PUB TYPE Reports- Research/Technical (143) Speeches/Conference Papers (150)

In order to build robust natural language processing systems that can.detect and recover from miscommunication, the investigation of how people communicate and how they recover from problems in communication described in this artificial intelligence report focused on reference problems which a listener may have in determining what or whom a speaker is talking about. The paper first details the investigation, in which protocols of subjects communicating about a task were analyzed, and knowledge about linguistic and physical context that listeners used to recover from reference miscommunication was isolated. The report then discusses the algorithms designed to apply that knowledge to ideatify the most likely places for the speaker's error. The paper describes how computer programs were then written (1) to represent a spatially complex physical world, (2) to manipulate that structure to reflec