The Theory and Use of Clarification Requests in Dialogue (original) (raw)

Clarification requests are an important, relatively common and yet under-studied dialogue device allowing a user to ask about some feature (e.g. the meaning or form) of an utterance, or part thereof. They can take many different forms (often highly elliptical) and can have many different meanings (requesting various types of information). This thesis combines empirical, theoretical and implementational work to provide a study of the various types of clarification request that exist, give a theoretical analysis thereof, and show how the results can be applied to add useful capabilities to a prototype computational dialogue system.