Title: The Pragmatics of Indirect Commands in Collaborative Discourse,
Abstract: Today's artificial assistants are typically prompted to perform tasks through
direct, imperative commands such as \emph{Set a timer} or \emph{Pick up the
box}. However, to progress toward more natural exchanges between humans and
these assistants, it is important to understand the way non-imperative
utterances can indirectly elicit action of an addressee. In this paper, we
investigate command types in the setting of a grounded, collaborative game. We
focus on a less understood family of utterances for eliciting agent action,
locatives like \emph{The chair is in the other room}, and demonstrate how these
utterances indirectly command in specific game state contexts. Our work shows
that models with domain-specific grounding can effectively realize the
pragmatic reasoning that is necessary for more robust natural language
interaction.