Would I Lie to You? Modelling Misrepresentation and Context in Dialogue

Carl Gutwin, Gordon I. McCalla

Abstract: In this paper we discuss a mechanism for modifying context in a tutorial dialogue. The context mechanism imposes a pedagogically motivated misrepresentation (PMM) on a dialogue to achieve instructional goals. In the paper, we outline several types of PMMs and detail a particular PMM in a sample dialogue situation. While the notion of PMMs are specifically oriented towards tutorial dialogue, misrepresentation has interesting implications for context in dialogue situations generally, and also suggests that Grice's maxim of quality needs to be modified.