Communicative Goals

In naturally occurring discourse, much that is meant to be communicated is left out of the explicit text. The interpreter must reconstruct much of the intended meaning ; and the generator can leave out information that will be reconstructed. In this paper, we use an abductive approach to generation and interpretation to provide an account of how the generative and interpretive processes can be mutually at-tuned with respect to implicit communication. The paper concentrates on the goals of interpretation and generation.