Pragmatic Query Answering: Results from a Quantitative Evaluation

Jon Scott Stevens, Anton Benz, Sebastian Reuße, Ralf Klabunde, Lisa Raithel

Abstract: This paper reports on an implementation of methods for generating indirect responses in question-answering dialogue based on domain-level strategic reasoning. User’s questions are interpreted as reflexes of underlying user requirements which are potentially satisfied by information beyond what is directly asked about. We find that the algorithms that reason about user requirements yield significantly shorter dialogues than a simpler baseline, and that users are able to interact with these systems in a pragmatically natural way.