Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Meta Comments, such as "however," "as I have stated before" and "if you pardon the expression," are pervasive in human discourse. In this paper, we present a predictive mechanism for the generation of Meta Comments based on the tenet that they signal a change in the status of beliefs and expectations a listener is conjectured to possess. In particular, our mechanism anticipates a listener's expectations by activating prescribed inferences on the state of the discourse. It is being implemented in a system called FIGMENT II which generates commentaries on the solution of algebraic equations.