Natural Language Pragmatics as Applied to Computing

Pragmatics is the branch of linguistics that studies types of speech acts (statements, requests, commands, questions, declarations, etc.) and the process by which people recognize and respond to them. Much of pragmatics is being reinvented, clumsily, by computer scientists designing communication protocols, electronic commerce systems, and software with interacting components. Rather than reinvent pragmatics, we should take existing results from linguistics and refine them. In the talk I'll apply speech act theory to electronic commerce, KQML, and parts of the TCP/IP protocol set, inter alia. Some related papers are on www.ai.uga.edu/~mc .

LS Home page or Talks in 1999/2000