A Computational Approach to the Interpretation of Indirect Speech Acts

Abstract

An Indirect Speech Act (ISA) is an utterance that conveys a message that is different from its literal meaning, often for reasons of politeness or subtlety. The DenK-system provides us with a non-compositional way to look at Indirect Speech Acts that contain modal verbs. We can extract the non-literal meaning from these Indirect Speech Acts without having to consider the meaning of the modal verbs themselves. The system uses a special ‘verb-construction’ to model the composition of the ISA w.r.t. modal verbs, subject of the sentence, attitude or communicative verbs and the sentence-type. It then makes use of a collection of speech act assignment tables to look up the intended meaning of the ISA.