This project involves research on integrating the intentional and informational perspectives in architectures for interpretation and generation of interactive discourse. Particular problems investigated include the recognition by the listener of the speaker's plan, a formalization of the notion of "conversational record," discourse structure from a computational point of view, and analysis of implicatures involving quantity and similar phenomena involving interactions between the processes of generation and interpretation. Bases for the research are the use of abductive inference in finite-state approximation methods and in knowledge-based systems, accommodation processes in interactive discourse, generation of coherent text, use of defeasible reasoning in plan recognition, and utterance planning to achieve communicative goals.
