Archaeology and the analysis of coherence of intention in
natural language dialogue

Dr. Paul Mc Kevitt

Department of Computer Science 
University of Sheffield
England

p.mckevitt@dcs.shef.ac.uk

Much of the work on the computer processing of natural languages,
or (ITALICS: natural language processing), has concentrated on studying
the structure, meaning, and usage of individual utterances. One
of the problems in natural language processing is to build theories,
models and implementations of how individual utterances cling together
into a coherent discourse.
We have developed a theory of intention analysis for solving, in part,
the problem of natural language dialogue processing. A central principle
of the theory is that coherence of natural language dialogue can be
modelled by analysing sequences of peoples intention.
The theory is incorporated within Operating System CONsultant (OSCON)
We demonstrate that the theory and computational model can be
applied to the problem of modelling the level of expertise of a user.
The results have implications for Philosophy, Psychology and Artificial
Intelligence. With respect to archaeology there are a number of
implications for the study of coherence of dialogue from previous cultures
or dialogue about such cultures.