LANSKY@SRI-AI.ARPA (02/21/86)
From: LANSKY@SRI-AI.ARPA
INFERRING DOMAIN PLANS IN QUESTION-ANSWERING
Martha E. Pollack (POLLACK@SRI-AI)
AI Center, SRI International
11:00 AM, MONDAY, February 24
SRI International, Building E, Room EJ228 (new conference room)
The importance of plan inference (PI) in models of conversation has been
widely noted in the computational-linguistics literature, and its
incorporation into question-answering systems has enabled a range of
cooperative behaviors. The PI process in each of these systems, however, has
assumed that the questioner (Q) whose plan is being inferred and the
respondent (R) who is drawing the inference have identical beliefs about the
actions in the domain. In this talk I will argue that this assumption is too
strong, and often results in failure not only of the PI process, but also of
the communicative process that PI is meant to support. In particular, it
precludes the principled generation of appropriate responses to queries that
arise from invalid plans. I will present a model of PI in conversation that
distinguishes between the beliefs of the questioner and the beliefs of the
respondent. This will rest on an account of plans as mental phenomena:
"having a plan" will be analyzed as having a particular configuration of
beliefs and intentions. Judgements that a plan is invalid will be associated
with particular discrepancies between the beliefs that R ascribes to Q, when
R believes Q has some particular plan, and the beliefs R herself holds.
An account of different types of plan invalidities will be given, and shown
to provide an explanation for certain regularities that are observable in
cooperative responses to questions.
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