---
title: "The Need for Referent Identification as a Planned Action"
authors:
  - "Philip R. Cohen"
doi: ""
url: "https://ijcai.org/proceedings/1981/7"
pdf: "https://ijcai.org/proceedings/1981/0007.pdf"
venue: "Proceedings of the Seventh International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence"
year: 1981
pages: "31-35"
track: "Natural Language"
keywords:
---

# The Need for Referent Identification as a Planned Action

Philip R. Cohen

*Proceedings of the Seventh International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence*, pages 31-35.

## Abstract

The paper presents evidence that speakers often attempt to get hearers to identify referents as a separate step in the speaker's plan. Many of the communicative acts pert"ormed in service of such referent identification steps can be analyzed by extending a plan-based theory of communication for task-oriented dialogues to include anrepresenting a hearer's identifying the referent of a description -- an action that is reasoned about in speakers' and hearers' plans. The phenomenon of addressing referent identification as a separate goal is shown to distinguish telephone from teletype task-oriented dialogues and thus has implications for the design of speech-understanding systems.