Leibniz-Zentrum Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft Leibniz-Gemeinschaft

PRAGSales - Pragmatic Requirements for Answer Generation in a Sales Dialogue

The project's goal is to model three interacting pragmatic aspects of utterance generation based on the dialogue situation "sales talk in real estate acquisition," between an artificial consultant and human customers. By an implementation and subsequent evaluation, the sustainability of the theoretical assumptions will be tested. The three interacting aspects are:

  • the use of rhetorical relations in dialogue situations
  • framing effects
  • relevance implicatures; in particular their interaction with rhetorical relations and framing effects

The project aims at a clarification of the interaction of these three aspects. The evocation of implicature in text generation has been little investigated in the past. We take up an important development in recent research on game theoretic pragmatics and implement the model, which will be developed in this project, in the generation component of a dialog system.

Project description (German)

Publications

  • Benz, Anton & Jon Stevens. 2018. Game-Theoretic Approaches to Pragmatics. Annual review of linguistics 4. 173-191. Palo Alto: CA. Annual Reviews. DOI: 10.1146/annurev-linguistics-011817-045641.
  • Stevens, Jon Scott, Anton Benz, Sebastian Reuße & Ralf Klabunde. 2016. Pragmatic question answering: A game-theoretic approach. Data & Knowledge Engineering 106. DOI: 10.1016/j.datak.2016.06.002.
  • Stevens, Jon Scott. A signaling account of contrastive focus. Proceedings of Sinn und Bedeutung 20. 694-711.
  • Stevens, Jon Scott. 2016. When do we think strategically? Zeitschrift für Sprachwissenschaft 35(1), 97-108.
  • Stevens, Jon. 2015. The role of preferred outcomes in determining implicit questioning strategies. Proceedings of the 20th Amsterdam Colloquium. 378-387.
  • Stevens, Jon, Anton Benz, Sebastian Reuße & Ralf Klabunde. 2015. Pragmatic query answering: Re-sults from a quantitative evaluation. In Chris Biemann, Siegfried Handschuh, André Freitas, Farid Meziane & Elisabeth Metais (eds.), Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Natural Language Processing and Information Systems: Proceedings of NLDB 2015, 110-123. Berlin: Springer.
  • Stevens, Jon, Anton Benz, Sebastian Reuße & Ralf Klabunde. 2015. A strategic reasoning model for generating alternative answers. Proceedings of ACL 2015, 534-542. Beijing: Association for Computational Linguistics.
  • Stevens, Jon Scott, Anton Benz, Sebastian Reuße, Ronja Laarmann-Quante & Ralf Klabunde. 2014. Indirect answers as potential solutions to decision problems. In Verena Rieser & Philippe Muller (eds.), Proceedings of DialWatt - SemDial 2014, 145-153. Edinburgh: U Edinburgh.

Talks and Posters

  • Reuße, Sebastian, Ralf Klabunde, Jon Stevens & Anton Benz. Generating surplus content in a Q/A setting. Poster, Workshop on the Semantics and Pragmatics of Dialogue, 16.-18.07.2016, Rutgers U.
  • Stevens, Jon. A game-theoretic look at non-literal answers. 38. Jahrestagung der DGFS, 24.- 26.02.2016, U Konstanz.
  • Stevens, Jon, Anton Benz, Sebastian Reuße & Ralf Klabunde. Pragmatic query answering: Results from a quantitative evaluation. NLDB 2015. 17. - 19.06.2015, Passau.
  • Benz, Anton & Jon Stevens. Alternative properties in indirect answers and their implicatures. 16th Szklarska Poreba workshop. 20. - 23.02.2015, Szklarska Poreba.
  • Benz, Anton & Jon Stevens. Indirect answers and their implicatures. Workshop on Pragmatic enrichment. 07.11.2014, U Lille.
  • Reuße, Sebastian, Jon Stevens, Anton Benz, Sebastian Reuße, Ronja Laarmann-Quante & Ralf Klabunde. Indirect an-swers as potential solutions to decision problems. 18th Workshop on the Semantics and Pragmatics of Dialogue. 01.09. - 03.09.2014, U Edinburgh.
  • Reuße, Sebastian, Jon Stevens, Anton Benz, Ralf Klabunde & Ronja Laarmann-Quante. Dialogue act annotation and modeling in a non- cooperative domain. 6th International Conference on Corpus Linguistics. 22.05. - 24.05.2014, Las Palmas.
  • Reuße, Sebastian, Ronja Laarmann-Quante, Ralf Klabunde, Jon Stevens & Anton Benz. Pragmatic constraints on automatic answer generation in sales dialogue. Poster, DGfS poster session for computational linguistics. 04.03.2014, U Marburg.