Recognizing user communicative intention in a consultant system with a natural language interface

This paper defines communicative intentions instead of illocutionary acts defined in the speech act theory, and proposes a method of recognizing them from user utterances. Although the speech act theory deals with the complex mental states of humans, similar complexity is not necessary for an effective interface between humans and machines, whose relation is modelled as that of master and slave. The authors reduce the complexity so that the communicative intentions can be recoognized easily