A Theoretical Model of Indirect Request Comprehension

Natural human dialogue often contains ambiguous or indirect speech. This poses a unique challenge to language understanding systems because comprehension requires going beyond what is said to what is implied. In this paper, we survey related work on the particularly challenging case of understanding non-conventional indirect speech acts, then propose a more generalizable rule rooted in building a mental model of the speaker. Finally, we discuss experimental evidence pointing to the cognitive plausibility of this rule.