Developing a corpus of strategic conversation in The Settlers of Catan

International audienceWe describe a dialogue model and an implemented annotation scheme for a pilot corpus of annotated online chats concerning bargaining negotiations in the game The Settlers of Catan. We will use this model and data to analyze how conversations proceed in the absence of strong forms of cooperativity, where agents have diverging motives. Here we concentrate on the description of our annotation scheme for negotiation dialogues, illustrated with our pilot data, and some perspectives for future research on the issue

Algorithmic aspects of theory blending

In Cognitive Science, conceptual blending has been proposed as an important cognitive mechanism that facilitates the creation of new concepts and ideas by constrained combination of available knowledge. It thereby provides a possible theoretical foundation for modeling high-level cognitive faculties such as the ability to understand, learn, and create new concepts and theories. This paper describes a logic-based framework which allows a formal treatment of theory blending, discusses algorithmic aspects of blending within the framework, and provides an illustrating worked out example from mathematics

Prosodic marking of contrasts in information structure

Successful dialogue requires cultivation of com-mon ground (Clark, 1996), shared information, which changes as the conversation proceeds. Dialogue partners can maintain common ground by using different modalities like eye gaze, facial expressions, gesture, content information or in-tonation. Here, we focus on intonation and inves-tigate how contrast in information structure is prosodically marked in spontaneous speech. Combinatory Categorial Grammar (CCG, Steedman 2000) distinguishes theme and rheme as elements of information structure. In some cases they can be distinguished by the pitch ac-cent with which the corresponding words are realised. We experimentally evoke instances o

When almost is not even close: Remarks on the approximability of HDTP

A growing number of researchers in Cognitive Science advocate the thesis that human cognitive capacities are constrained by computational tractability. If right, this thesis also can be expected to have far-reaching consequences for work in Artificial General Intelligence: Models and systems considered as basis for the development of general cognitive architectures with human-like performance would also have to comply with tractability constraints, making in-depth complexity theoretic analysis a necessary and important part of the standard research and development cycle already from a rather early stage. In this paper we present an application case study for such an analysis based on results from a parametrized complexity and approximation theoretic analysis of the Heuristic Driven Theory Projection (HDTP) analogy-making framework

Theory blending: extended algorithmic aspects and examples

In Cognitive Science, conceptual blending has been proposed as an important cognitive mechanism that facilitates the creation of new concepts and ideas by constrained combination of available knowledge. It thereby provides a possible theoretical foundation for modeling high-level cognitive faculties such as the ability to understand, learn, and create new concepts and theories. Quite often the development of new mathematical theories and results is based on the combination of previously independent concepts, potentially even originating from distinct subareas of mathematics. Conceptual blending promises to offer a framework for modeling and re-creating this form of mathematical concept invention with computational means. This paper describes a logic-based framework which allows a formal treatment of theory blending (a subform of the general notion of conceptual blending with high relevance for applications in mathematics), discusses an interactive algorithm for blending within the framework, and provides several illustrating worked examples from mathematics