Metaphorical meaning is not a flat mapping between concepts, but a complex cognitive phenomenon that integrates multiple levels of interpretation. In this paper, we propose a stratified model of metaphor processing that treats meaning as an onion: a multi-layered structure comprising (1) content analysis, (2) conceptual blending, and (3) pragmatic intentionality. This three-dimensional framework allows for a richer and more cognitively grounded approach to metaphor interpretation in computational systems. At the first level, metaphors are annotated through basic conceptual elements. At the second level, we model conceptual combinations, linking components to emergent meanings. Finally, at the third level, we introduce a pragmatic vocabulary to capture speaker intent, communicative function, and contextual effects, aligning metaphor understanding with pragmatic theories. By unifying these layers into a single formal framework, our model lays the groundwork for computational methods capable of representing metaphorical meaning beyond surface associations, toward deeper, more context-sensitive reasoning.

When users formulate queries, they often include not only the information they seek, but also pragmatic markers such as interrogative phrasing or polite requests. Although these speech act indicators communicate the user\textquotesingle s intent -- whether it is asking a question, making a request, or stating a fact -- they do not necessarily add to the core informational content of the query itself. This paper investigates whether extracting the underlying propositional content from user utterances -- essentially stripping away the linguistic markers of intent -- can improve retrieval quality in Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems. Drawing upon foundational insights from speech act theory, we propose a practical method for automatically transforming queries into their propositional equivalents before embedding. To assess the efficacy of this approach, we conducted an experimental study involving 63 user queries related to a Brazilian telecommunications news corpus with precomputed semantic embeddings. Results demonstrate clear improvements in semantic similarity between query embeddings and document embeddings at top ranks, confirming that queries stripped of speech act indicators more effectively retrieve relevant content.

Understanding pragmatics-the use of language in context-is crucial for developing NLP systems capable of interpreting nuanced language use. Despite recent advances in language technologies, including large language models, evaluating their ability to handle pragmatic phenomena such as implicatures and references remains challenging. To advance pragmatic abilities in models, it is essential to understand current evaluation trends and identify existing limitations. In this survey, we provide a comprehensive review of resources designed for evaluating pragmatic capabilities in NLP, categorizing datasets by the pragmatics phenomena they address. We analyze task designs, data collection methods, evaluation approaches, and their relevance to real-world applications. By examining these resources in the context of modern language models, we highlight emerging trends, challenges, and gaps in existing benchmarks. Our survey aims to clarify the landscape of pragmatic evaluation and guide the development of more comprehensive and targeted benchmarks, ultimately contributing to more nuanced and context-aware NLP models.

The notion of face described by Brown and Levinson (1987) has been studied in great detail, but a critical aspect of the framework, that which focuses on how intentions mediate the planning of turns which impose upon face, has received far less attention. We present an analysis of three computational systems trained for classifying both intention and politeness, focusing on how the former influences the latter. In politeness theory, agents attend to the desire to have their wants appreciated (positive face), and a complementary desire to act unimpeded and maintain freedom (negative face). Similar to speech acts, utterances can perform so-called face acts which can either raise or threaten the positive or negative face of the speaker or hearer. We begin by using an existing corpus to train a model which classifies face acts, achieving a new SoTA in the process. We then observe that every face act has an underlying intention that motivates it and perform additional experiments integrating dialog act annotations to provide these intentions by proxy. Our analysis finds that dialog acts improve performance on face act detection for minority classes and points to a close relationship between aspects of face and intent.

Speech acts are a speakers actions when performing an utterance within a conversation, such as asking, recommending, greeting, or thanking someone, expressing a thought, or making a suggestion. Understanding speech acts helps interpret the intended meaning and actions behind a speakers or writers words. This paper proposes a Twitter dialectal Arabic speech act classification approach based on a transformer deep learning neural network. Twitter and social media, are becoming more and more integrated into daily life. As a result, they have evolved into a vital source of information that represents the views and attitudes of their users. We proposed a BERT based weighted ensemble learning approach to integrate the advantages of various BERT models in dialectal Arabic speech acts classification. We compared the proposed model against several variants of Arabic BERT models and sequence-based models. We developed a dialectal Arabic tweet act dataset by annotating a subset of a large existing Arabic sentiment analysis dataset (ASAD) based on six speech act categories. We also evaluated the models on a previously developed Arabic Tweet Act dataset (ArSAS). To overcome the class imbalance issue commonly observed in speech act problems, a transformer-based data augmentation model was implemented to generate an equal proportion of speech act categories. The results show that the best BERT model is araBERTv2-Twitter models with a macro-averaged F1 score and an accuracy of 0.73 and 0.84, respectively. The performance improved using a BERT-based ensemble method with a 0.74 and 0.85 averaged F1 score and accuracy on our dataset, respectively.

Certain forms of linguistic annotation, like part of speech and semantic tagging, can be automated with high accuracy. However, manual annotation is still necessary for complex pragmatic and discursive features that lack a direct mapping to lexical forms. This manual process is time-consuming and error-prone, limiting the scalability of function-to-form approaches in corpus linguistics. To address this, our study explores automating pragma-discursive corpus annotation using large language models (LLMs). We compare ChatGPT, the Bing chatbot, and a human coder in annotating apology components in English based on the local grammar framework. We find that the Bing chatbot outperformed ChatGPT, with accuracy approaching that of a human coder. These results suggest that AI can be successfully deployed to aid pragma-discursive corpus annotation, making the process more efficient and scalable. Keywords: linguistic annotation, function-to-form approaches, large language models, local grammar analysis, Bing chatbot, ChatGPT

Leveraging an established exercise in negotiation education, we build a novel dataset for studying how the use of language shapes bilateral bargaining. Our dataset extends existing work in two ways: 1) we recruit participants via behavioral labs instead of crowdsourcing platforms and allow participants to negotiate through audio, enabling more naturalistic interactions; 2) we add a control setting where participants negotiate only through alternating, written numeric offers.Despite the two contrasting forms of communication, we find that the average agreed prices of the two treatments are identical. But when subjects can talk, fewer offers are exchanged, negotiations finish faster, the likelihood of reaching agreement rises, and the variance of prices at which subjects agree drops substantially. We further propose a taxonomy of speech acts in negotiation and enrich the dataset with annotated speech acts. We set up prediction tasks to predict negotiation success and find that being reactive to the arguments of the other party is advantageous over driving the negotiation.

Spoken languages often utilise intonation, rhythm, intensity, and structure, to communicate intention, which can be interpreted differently depending on the rhythm of speech of their utterance. These speech acts provide the foundation of communication and are unique in expression to the language. Recent advancements in attention-based models, demonstrating their ability to learn powerful representations from multilingual datasets, have performed well in speech tasks and are ideal to model specific tasks in low resource languages. Here, we develop a novel multimodal approach combining two models, wav2vec2.0 for audio and MarianMT for text translation, by using multimodal attention fusion to predict speech acts in our prepared Bengali speech corpus. We also show that our model BeAts ($\underline{\textbf{Be}}$ngali speech acts recognition using Multimodal $\underline{\textbf{At}}$tention Fu$\underline{\textbf{s}}$ion) significantly outperforms both the unimodal baseline using only speech data and a simpler bimodal fusion using both speech and text data. Project page: https://soumitri2001.github.io/BeAts

Natural language understanding is the study of making machines understand the daily used informal text. There are two main categories of methods, statistic-based methods and rule-based methods. Benefiting from the blow-up of deep learning algorithms such as transformer[1], the statistic-based methods upgrade from the traditional Bayesian methods and have better robustness. On the hand, the rule-based methods are wildly used in expert systems, which are run by handwritten rules from experts and use the patterns to map the natural language to machine-readable commands such as SQL, the LUNAR system[2], as an example, which is used in the analysis of lunar geology. Although both methods have got great achievements, there still exist some main challenges that we need to resolve. In section 2, we will discuss the success and challenges of the existing natural language understanding models. In section 3, a potential solution to the OOV problem from word embedding which limits the deep neural method to reasoning and understanding will be presented. In section 4, we will propose our semantic model in detail to move the natural language understanding into the next stage.

Linguistic pragmatics state that a conversation's underlying speech acts can constrain the type of response which is appropriate at each turn in the conversation. When generating dialogue responses, neural dialogue agents struggle to produce diverse responses. Currently, dialogue diversity is assessed using automatic metrics, but the underlying speech acts do not inform these metrics. To remedy this, we propose the notion of Pragmatically Appropriate Diversity, defined as the extent to which a conversation creates and constrains the creation of multiple diverse responses. Using a human-created multi-response dataset, we find significant support for the hypothesis that speech acts provide a signal for the diversity of the set of next responses. Building on this result, we propose a new human evaluation task where creative writers predict the extent to which conversations inspire the creation of multiple diverse responses. Our studies find that writers' judgments align with the Pragmatically Appropriate Diversity of conversations. Our work suggests that expectations for diversity metric scores should vary depending on the speech act.