Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

This paper reports a new theory of natural language processing and its implementation in a computerprogram, DIALS (for DIALogue Structures). This represents a radical departure from the paradigmaticapproach to natural language processing currently dominating the Helds of artificial intelligence, linguistics,and language philosophy, among others. W e use the theory of metacommunication to develop a"pragmatic grammar" for the structural analysis of dialogue. W e are currently able to parse and generateover 5000 surface forms of a single underlying request content. W e propose using this pragmatic informationto manage the communication context, including inferring some of a speakers' goals and controllingstatus and politeness.