Speech Acts and Rationality
By Philip R. Cohen, Hector J. Levesque. 1985
This paper derives the basis of a theory of communication from a formal theory of rational interaction. The major result is a demonstration that illocutionary acts need not be primitive, and need not be recognized. As a test case. we derive Searle's conditions on requesting from principles of rationality coupled with a Gricean theory of imperatives. The theory is shown to distinguish insincere or nonserious imperatives from true requests. Extensions to indirect speech acts, and ramifications for natural language systems are also briefly discussed.
Subfields: Philosophy
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Citations in the corpus
- Towards Coherent and Cohesive Long-form Text Generation (2018, background): “…and other forms of coherence and cohesion relations and their quantifi-cation (Edmundson, 1969; Halliday and Hasan, 1976; Hobbs, 1985; McKeown, 1985; Cohen and Levesque, 1985; Hovy, 1988; Liddy, 1991; Hovy, 1991; Mani et al., 1998; Cristea et al., 1998; Barzi-lay and Lapata, 2008; Van Dijk, 2013).”
- Survey of the State of the Art in Natural Language Generation: Core tasks, applications and evaluation (2017, background): “Indeed, some of the earliest ai work in this tradition (especially Cohen & Perrault, 1979; Cohen & Levesque, 1985) sought an explicit formulation of preconditions (akin to Searle’s felicity conditions) for speech acts and their consequences.”
- Computational Generation of Referring Expressions: A Survey (2012, unknown): “KAMP (Appelt 1985 ), for example, was conceived as a general utterance planning system, building on Cohen and Levesque's ( 1985 ) formal speech act theory.”
- Emotion Recognition in Conversation: Research Challenges, Datasets, and Recent Advances (2019, background): “Cohen and Levesque [19] developed a model and logic to represent intentions and their connections to utterances, whose operators explicate the treatment of beliefs about the interlocutor’s beliefs and vice versa, recursively.”