On dialogue games and coherent strategies

We explain how to see the set of positions of a dialogue game as a coherence space in the sense of Girard or as a bistructure in the sense of Curien, Plotkin and Winskel. The coherence structure on the set of positions results from a Kripke translation of tensorial logic into linear logic extended with a necessity modality. The translation is done in such a way that every innocent strategy defines a clique or a configuration in the resulting space of positions. This leads us to study the notion of configuration designed by Curien, Plotkin and Winskel for general bistructures in the particular case of a bistructure associated to a dialogue game. We show that every such configuration may be seen as an interactive strategy equipped with a backward as well as a forward dynamics based on the interplay between the stable order and the extensional order. In that way, the category of bistructures is shown to include a full subcategory of games and coherent strategies of an interesting nature

Deep Reinforcement Learning for Dialogue Generation

Recent neural models of dialogue generation offer great promise for generating responses for conversational agents, but tend to be shortsighted, predicting utterances one at a time while ignoring their influence on future outcomes. Modeling the future direction of a dialogue is crucial to generating coherent, interesting dialogues, a need which led traditional NLP models of dialogue to draw on reinforcement learning. In this paper, we show how to integrate these goals, applying deep reinforcement learning to model future reward in chatbot dialogue. The model simulates dialogues between two virtual agents, using policy gradient methods to reward sequences that display three useful conversational properties: informativity (non-repetitive turns), coherence, and ease of answering (related to forward-looking function). We evaluate our model on diversity, length as well as with human judges, showing that the proposed algorithm generates more interactive responses and manages to foster a more sustained conversation in dialogue simulation. This work marks a first step towards learning a neural conversational model based on the long-term success of dialogues

Arguing and negotiating in the presence of social influences

Postprin

Wittgenstein's Paperwork. An Example from the "Big Typescript"

The edition of the Nachlass from the early thirties by Michael Nedo and the completion of the "Bergen Electronic Edition" (BEE) have provided Wittgenstein scholars with all the material required to investigate the author's philosophical development starting with his auto-criticism of the "Tractatus" and leading to his later views. Wittgenstein's strategy of dictating from his notebooks and cutting up the typescripts to rearrange paragraphs into sequences of remarks is well documented in Nedo's edition and the BEE provides convenient facsimile access to every page Wittgenstein wrote or edited throughout the process. Some researchers have begun to revise received opinions that were based upon the "books" previously published by the trustees. (Hrachovec 2002, 2004, Kientzler 1997, Nyiri 2002, Pichler 2004, Stern 2002) Yet, the scientific community has barely begun to discover the richness and density of the philosophical endeavor manifesting itself in this material. There has, understandably, been an interest to trace the origin of remarks, well-known from the "Philosophical Investigations", providing some background to Wittgenstein's most popular ideas. Various doctrines of what is becoming known as the "middle Wittgenstein" have been noticed, but they have themselves been perceived as more or less consolidated theories. Wittgenstein's editorial activity has been recognized as a hypertextual undertaking avant la lettre, yet there has been insufficient attention to the philosophical impact of these hypertextual strategies themselves. It is all too easy to be caught by someprovisional result captured on a printed page and to overlook the fact that some of its philosophical significance can only be recognized by considering its genesis

La importancia de la magnitud de las protestas del movimiento Occupy: el caso de una protesta local como instrumento de comunicación mediante las Relaciones Públicas y los Medios Sociales

This paper explores the persuasive communications (public relations and branding through social media) of a micro Occupy event, namely a nine-day appearance of the global protest movement at Bournemouth University (BU), on the south coast of the UK. It reflects on how student and town protesters used digital and social media in comparison to the wider and more successful UK movement. It interviews the student leader, and asks questions about the role social networks like Occupii.org played in formulating communication strategies as well as how they integrated with more popular social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter. The conclusions coming from our micro case study suggest that without a supportive geographic and civic location; clear and focused messages, and robust strategic communication planning and execution, Occupy events will remain very small