Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

In the process of generating discourse, speakers generate utterances which directly achieve the communicative goal of conveying an information item to a hearer, and they also generate utterances which prevent the disruption of correct beliefs maintained by a hearer or the inception of incorrect beliefs. In this paper, we propose a representation scheme which supports a discourse planning mechanism that exhibits both behaviors. Our representation is based on a characterization of commonly occurring impairments to the knowledge acquisition process in terms of a model of a hearer's beliefs. As a testbed of these ideas, a discourse planner called WISHFUL is being implemented in the domain of high-school algebra.