Inferring Acceptance and Rejection in Dialogue by Default Rules of Inference

This paper discusses the processes by which conversants in a dialogue can infer whether their assertions and proposals have been accepted or rejected by their conversational partners. It expands on previous work by showing that logical consistency is a necessary indicator of acceptance, but that it is not sufficient, and that logical inconsistency is sufficient as an indicator of rejection, but it is not necessary. I show how conversants can use information structure and prosody as well as logical reasoning in distinguishing between acceptances and logically consistent rejections, and relate this work to previous work on implicature and default reasoning by introducing three new classes of rejection: {\sc implicature rejections}, {\sc epistemic rejections} and {\sc deliberation rejections}. I show how these rejections are inferred as a result of default inferences, which, by other analyses, would have been blocked by the context. In order to account for these facts, I propose a model of the common ground that allows these default inferences to go through, and show how the model, originally proposed to account for the various forms of acceptance, can also model all types of rejection.Comment: 37 pages, uses fullpage, lingmacros, name

Collaborating on Referring Expressions

This paper presents a computational model of how conversational participants collaborate in order to make a referring action successful. The model is based on the view of language as goal-directed behavior. We propose that the content of a referring expression can be accounted for by the planning paradigm. Not only does this approach allow the processes of building referring expressions and identifying their referents to be captured by plan construction and plan inference, it also allows us to account for how participants clarify a referring expression by using meta-actions that reason about and manipulate the plan derivation that corresponds to the referring expression. To account for how clarification goals arise and how inferred clarification plans affect the agent, we propose that the agents are in a certain state of mind, and that this state includes an intention to achieve the goal of referring and a plan that the agents are currently considering. It is this mental state that sanctions the adoption of goals and the acceptance of inferred plans, and so acts as a link between understanding and generation.Comment: 32 pages, 2 figures, to appear in Computation Linguistics 21-

Collaborative Behaviour Modelling of Virtual Agents using Communication in a Mixed Human-Agent Teamwork

International audience—The coordination is an essential ingredient for the mixed human-agent teamwork. It requires team members to share knowledge to establish common grounding and mutual awareness among them. In this paper, we proposed a collaborative conversational belief-desire-intention (C 2 BDI) behavioural agent architecture that allows to enhance the knowledge sharing using natural language communication between team members. We defined collaborative conversation protocols that provide proactive behaviour to agents for the coordination between team members. Furthermore, to endow the communication capabilities to C 2 BDI agent, we described the information state based approach for the natural language processing of the utterances. We have applied the proposed architecture to a real scenario in a collaborative virtual environment for training. Our solution enables the user to coordinate with other team members

Different views : including others in participatory health service innovation

We describe our experiences employing experience-based design (EBD) to improve an outpatients health service in the UK and discuss the impacts of incorporating the voices of those not directly using or working within the service. We suggest that such new perspectives, experiences and expertise may enable the development of service innovations outside patients’ and staffs’ conceptual space of problems/solutions, but can affect the ownership and agency within the change project. To conclude, we propose a balance between accomplishing change and creating the self-belief to achieve it

Extraneous Voices: Orphaned and Adopted Texts in the Protagoras

The Protagoras features the first known venture into detailed textual interpretation in the Western intellectual tradition. Yet if Socrates is to be taken at his wordat the close of his hermeneutic contest with Protagoras, this venture is to be regarded as a playful demonstration of the worthlessness of texts for aiding in the pursuit of knowledge. This essay is an attempt to view Socrates’ puzzling remarks on this point within their dramatic and historical contexts. I argue that, far from having us lay our inherited texts aside, we can find in the Protagoras a reorientation to the linked activities of reading and dialogue, where we need not be forced to choose between merely using our own unaided voices and relying upon the voices of others in the project of philosophic education

Beyond ‘Interaction’: How to Understand Social Effects on Social Cognition

In recent years, a number of philosophers and cognitive scientists have advocated for an ‘interactive turn’ in the methodology of social-cognition research: to become more ecologically valid, we must design experiments that are interactive, rather than merely observational. While the practical aim of improving ecological validity in the study of social cognition is laudable, we think that the notion of ‘interaction’ is not suitable for this task: as it is currently deployed in the social cognition literature, this notion leads to serious conceptual and methodological confusion. In this paper, we tackle this confusion on three fronts: 1) we revise the ‘interactionist’ definition of interaction; 2) we demonstrate a number of potential methodological confounds that arise in interactive experimental designs; and 3) we show that ersatz interactivity works just as well as the real thing. We conclude that the notion of ‘interaction’, as it is currently being deployed in this literature, obscures an accurate understanding of human social cognition