1 Efficient natural language generation has been successfully demonstrated using highly compiled knowledge about speech acts and their related social actions. A design and prototype implementation of a parser which utilizes this same pragmatic knowledge to efficiently guide parsing is presented. Such guidance is shown to prune the search space and thus avoid needless processing of pragmatically unlikely constituent structures. INTRODUCTION The use of purely syntactic knowledge during the parse phase of natural language understanding yields considerable local ambiguity (consideration of impossible subeonstituents) as well global ambiguity (construction of syntactically valid parses not applicable to the socio-pragmatic context)
