Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

During natural language interactions, it is often the case that a set of statements issued by a speaker/writer can be interpreted in a number of ways by a listener/reader. Sometimes the intended interpretation can not be determined by considering only conversation coherence and relevance of the presented information, and specialized domain knowledge m a y be necessary in choosing the intended interpretation. In this paper, we identify the points during the inference process where such specialized knowledge can be successfully applied to aid in assessing the likelihood of an interpretation, and present the results of an inference process that uses domain knowledge, in addition to other factors, such as coherence and relevance, to choose the interpretation intended by the speaker. Our mechanism has been developed for use in task-oriented consultation systems. The particular domain that we have chosen for exploration is that of a travel agency.