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<Paper uid="W04-0202">
  <Title>Kaplan, J., Cooperative Responses from a Portable</Title>
  <Section position="1" start_page="0" end_page="1" type="abstr">
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Abstract
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    <Paragraph position="0"> In this paper, we present a preliminary version of COOPML, a language designed for annotating co-operative discourse. We investigate the different linguistic marks that identify and characterize the different forms of cooperativity found in written texts from FAQs, Forums and emails.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> 1 What are cooperative responses and why annotate them ? Grice (Grice, 1975) proposed a number of maxims that describe various ways in which speakers are engaged in a cooperative conversation. Human conversations are governed by implicit rules, used and understood by all conversants. The contents of a response can be just direct w.r.t. the question literal contents, but it can also go beyond what is normally expected, in a relevant way, in order to meet the questioner's expectations. Such a response is said to be cooperative.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="2"> Following these maxims and related works, e.g.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="3"> (Searle, 1975), in the early 1990s, a number of forms of cooperative responses were identified.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="4"> Most of the efforts in these studies and systems focussed on the foundations and on the implementation of reasoning procedures (Gal, 1988), (Minock et ali., 1996), while little attention was paid to question analysis and NL response generation. An overview of these systems can be found in (Gasterland et al., 1994) and in (Webber et ali., 2002), based on works by (Hendrix et ali., 1978), (Kaplan, 1982), (Mays et ali., 1982), among others. These systems include e.g. the identification of false presuppositions and various types of misunderstandings found in questions. They also include reasoning schemas based e.g. on constant relaxation to provide approximate or alternative, but relevant, answers when the direct question has no response.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="5"> Intensional reasoning schemas can also be used to generalize over lists of basic responses or to construct summaries.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="6"> The framework of Advanced Reasoning for Question Answering (QA) systems, as described in a recent road map, raises new challenges since answers can no longer be only directly extracted from texts (as in TREC) or databases, but requires the use of a domain knowledge base, including a conceptual ontology, and dedicated inference mechanisms. Such a perspective, obviously, reinforces and gives a whole new insight to cooperative answering. For example, if one asks  : Q4: Where is the Borme les Mimosas cinema ? if there are no cinema in Borme les Mimosas, it can be responded: R4: There is none in Borme, the closests are in Londe (8kms) and in Hyeres (20kms), where close-by alternatives are proposed, involving relaxing Borme, identified as a village, into close-by villages or towns that respond to the question, evaluating proximity, and finally sorting the responses, e.g. by increasing distance from Borme. This simple example shows that, if a direct response cannot be found, several forms of knowledge, reasoning schemas and strategies need to be used. This is one of the major challenges of advanced QA. Another challenge, not yet addressed, is the generation of the response in natural language.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="7"> Our first aim is to study, via corpus annotations, how humans deploy cooperative behaviours and procedures, by what means, and what is the form of the responses provided. Our second aim is to construct a linguistically and cognitively adequate formal model that integrates language, knowledge and inference aspects involved in cooperative responses. Our assumption is then that an automatic cooperative QA system, although much more stereotyped than any natural system, could be induced from natural productions without loosing too much of the cooperative contents produced by humans.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="8"> From that point of view, the results presented in this paper establish a base for investigating cooperativity empirically and not only in an abstract and  Our corpora are in French, but, whenever possible we only give here English glosses for space reasons introspective way. Our goal is to get a kind of empirical testing and then model for cooperative answering, to get clearer ideas on the structure of cooperative discourse, the reasoning processes involved, the types of knowledge involved and the NL expression modes.</Paragraph>
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