A Tool for Extracting Conversational Implicatures

Marta Tatu, Dan Moldovan


Abstract
Explicitly conveyed knowledge represents only a portion of the information communicated by a text snippet. Automated mechanisms for deriving explicit information exist; however, the implicit assumptions and default inferences that capture our intuitions about a normal interpretation of a communication remain hidden for automated systems, despite the communication participants' ease of grasping the complete meaning of the communication. In this paper, we describe a reasoning framework for the automatic identification of conversational implicatures conveyed by real-world English and Arabic conversations carried via twitter.com. Our system transforms given utterances into deep semantic logical forms. It produces a variety of axioms that identify lexical connections between concepts, define rules of combining semantic relations, capture common-sense world knowledge, and encode Grice's Conversational Maxims. By exploiting this rich body of knowledge and reasoning within the context of the conversation, our system produces entailments and implicatures conveyed by analyzed utterances with an F-measure of 70.42% for English conversations.
Anthology ID:
L12-1039
Volume:
Proceedings of the Eighth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'12)
Month:
May
Year:
2012
Address:
Istanbul, Turkey
Editors:
Nicoletta Calzolari, Khalid Choukri, Thierry Declerck, Mehmet Uğur Doğan, Bente Maegaard, Joseph Mariani, Asuncion Moreno, Jan Odijk, Stelios Piperidis
Venue:
LREC
SIG:
Publisher:
European Language Resources Association (ELRA)
Note:
Pages:
2708–2715
Language:
URL:
http://www.lrec-conf.org/proceedings/lrec2012/pdf/175_Paper.pdf
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Marta Tatu and Dan Moldovan. 2012. A Tool for Extracting Conversational Implicatures. In Proceedings of the Eighth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'12), pages 2708–2715, Istanbul, Turkey. European Language Resources Association (ELRA).
Cite (Informal):
A Tool for Extracting Conversational Implicatures (Tatu & Moldovan, LREC 2012)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
http://www.lrec-conf.org/proceedings/lrec2012/pdf/175_Paper.pdf