Structures sémantiques et pragmatiques pour la modélisation de la cohérence dans des dialogues finalisés. (Semantic and Pragmatic structures for modelling coherence in task-oriented dialogues)

This study takes dialogue as a kind of discourse and focuses on its coherence. We consider coherence to be associated with relationship between utterances and the extra-linguistic context. This study deals with genuine data, as we collected a route explanation dialogue corpus during our Ph.D. We present here choices and issues such a project raises. Then we generalize our observations in order to propose a global interpretation model. We offer a linguistic descriptive analysis about significant phenomena of our corpus : route explanation utterances, questions and acknowledgements. The development of a basic tagger is associated with our quantitative study. In order to stay away from deep analysis of speakers? mental states, our main clue for the analysis is the linguistic form. This choice leads us to prefer conventional approaches to intentional ones. We model dialogue coherence in a dynamic framework, associated with pragmatic principles (primitive intentions and conventions). A theory of semantic/pragmatic interface (Segmented Discourse Representation Theory) gives us a structured framework. We propose new hypotheses and extensions within SDRT which are generalizable to any theory of discourse structure. About questions, we start with a detailed semantic/pragmatic study of the field. We propose a new study of the relationship between questions, answers and dialogic context. We investigate question-answers sequences in an exhaustive manner. Then we enrich our model of discourse interpretation by giving more importance to the discourse topic. Finally, our pathbreaking semantic study of acknowledgment contributes to sharpen the knowledge of feedback. Discourse topic is also used here for representation purposes. Acknowledgements are divided into more accurate categories. These results allow theories of discourse structure to approach more natural dialogues than those usually considered.

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