SPEECH ACTS, ELECTRONIC COMMERCE, AND KQML

Speech act theory (the study of how utterances function as statements, questions, commands, etc.) is increasingly applicable to software des ign. KQML, a knowledge interchange language developed with ARPA fundin g, is based on speech act theory. It differs in significant ways from human speech and conventional EDI, and it can be improved in a number of ways. Although speech act theory is highly relevant to electronic c ommunication, the needs of computers are different from those of human s. Computers need to perform concisely speech acts that are clumsy in human speech, such as arranging communication paths. They also need to recognize speech act types as immediately as possible, whereas human language gets along with clumsy encodings of speech acts into grammar. (C) 1998 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.