Goals and Actions in Natural Language Instructions

Loading...
Thumbnail Image
Penn collection
Technical Reports (CIS)
Degree type
Discipline
Subject
Funder
Grant number
License
Copyright date
Distributor
Related resources
Author
Di Eugenio, Barbara
Contributor
Abstract

Human agents are extremely flexible in dealing with Natural Language instructions: they are able both to adapt the plan they are developing to the input instructions, and vice versa, to adapt the input instructions to the plan they are developing. Borrowing the term from [Lewis 1979], I call this two-way adaptation process accommodation. In this proposal, I first define accommodation in the context of processing instructions. I then provide evidence for the particular inferences I advocate, and for the further claim that such inferences are directed by the goal to achieve which certain action is performed. The evidence I provide comes from my analysis of naturally occurring instructions, and in particular of purpose clauses and of negative imperatives. Finally, I propose a computational model of instructions able to support accommodation inferences. Such model is composed of: a speaker / hearer model of imperatives, based on the one presented in [Cohen and Levesque 90]; an action representation formalism based on a hybrid system, รก la KRYPTON [Brachman et al. 1983a], whose primitives are those proposed in [Jackendoff 1990]; and inference mechanisms that contribute to building the structure of the intentions that the agent develops while interpreting instructions.

Advisor
Date Range for Data Collection (Start Date)
Date Range for Data Collection (End Date)
Digital Object Identifier
Series name and number
Publication date
1992-02-01
Volume number
Issue number
Publisher
Publisher DOI
Journal Issue
Comments
University of Pennsylvania Department of Computer and Information Science Technical Report No.MS-CIS-92-07.
Recommended citation
Collection