Plan recognition in understanding instructions

Abstract Plan recognition is generally understood as the process of inferring the higher level goals that an action is meant to achieve. In this paper, we will discuss such inferences in the context of understanding and executing Natural Language instructions and show that they follow from the partial nature of Natural Language descriptions: borrowing the term from Lewis [1979], we collectively call them accommodation. Accommodation can be seen as a type of plan recognition: we will compare accommodation with other kinds of inferences that have been studied in the plan recognition literature – in particular by Kautz [1990] and Pollack [1986].