International audienceA Gricean view of cognitive agents holds that agents are fully rational and adhere to the maxims of conversation that entail that speakers adopt shared intentions and fully aligned preferences–e.g. (Allen and Litman, 1987; Lochbaum, 1998). These assumptions are unwarranted in many conversational settings. In this paper we propose a different view and an annotation scheme for it

Afantenos, Stergos

Asher, Nicholas

Benamara, Farah

Cadilhac, Anaïs

Denis, Pascal

Dégremont, Cédric

Guhe, Markus

Keizer, Simon

Lascarides, Alex

Lemon, Oliver

Muller, Philippe

Paul, Soumya

Popescu, Vladimir

Rieser, Verena

Vieu, Laure

Edinburgh Research Explorer

     Edinburgh Research Explorer                                      Modelling Strategic Conversation: model, annotation design andcorpusCitation for published version:Afantenos, S, Asher, N, Benamara, F, Cadilhac, A, Dégremont, C, Denis, P, Guhe, M, Keizer, S,Lascarides, A, Lemon, O, Muller, P, Paul, S, Popescu, V, Rieser, V & Vieu, L 2012, Modelling StrategicConversation: model, annotation design and corpus. in S Brown-Schmidt, J Ginzburg & S Larsson (eds),Proceedings of SemDial 2012 (SeineDial): The 16th Workshop on the Semantics and Pragmatics ofDialogue. pp. 167-168.Link:Link to publication record in Edinburgh Research ExplorerDocument Version:Peer reviewed versionPublished In:Proceedings of SemDial 2012 (SeineDial)General rightsCopyright for the publications made accessible via the Edinburgh Research Explorer is retained by the author(s)and / or other copyright owners and it is a condition of accessing these publications that users recognise andabide by the legal requirements associated with these rights.Take down policyThe University of Edinburgh has made every reasonable effort to ensure that Edinburgh Research Explorercontent complies with UK legislation. If you believe that the public display of this file breaches copyright pleasecontact openaccess@ed.ac.uk providing details, and we will remove access to the work immediately andinvestigate your claim.Download date: 05. Apr. 2019Modelling Strategic Conversation: model, annotation design and corpusStergos Afantenos1, Nicholas Asher1, Farah Benamara1, Anais Cadilhac, Cedric De´gremont1,Pascal Denis3, Markus Guhe2, Simon Keizer4, Alex Lascarides2,Oliver Lemon4, Philippe Muller1, Soumya Paul1, Vladimir Popescu1,Verena Rieser4 Laure Vieu11: IRIT, Univ. Toulouse, France2: Department of Informatics, University of Edinburgh, U.K.3: Mostrare, INRIA NLE, France4: Herriott-Watt Univeristy, Edinburgh, U.K.1 IntroductionA Gricean view of cognitive agents holds thatagents are fully rational and adhere to the max-ims of conversation that entail that speakers adoptshared intentions and fully aligned preferences–e.g. (Allen and Litman, 1987; Lochbaum, 1998).These assumptions are unwarranted in many con-versational settings. In this paper we propose adifferent view and an annotation scheme for it.We propose a game theoretic approach to con-versation. While we assume like Grice that con-versational agents are rational, agents talk to max-imize their expected utility (a measure that com-bines belief and preference). Preferences togetherwith beliefs guide conversational actions as muchas they guide non linguistic actions. Conversa-tions are dynamic and extensive games, and theyhave an in principle unbounded number of pos-sible moves and no mandatory stopping points—you can, in some sense, always say anything, andyou can always continue a conversation. Themoves for each player consist in making a dis-course contribution, which we finitely charac-terize using discourse structure in the sense of(Asher and Lascarides, 2003). Such discoursestructures consist of discourse units linked to eachvia discourse relations like Elaboration, Question-Answer-Pair (QAP) and Explanation. In additionthese discourse relations serve to link one partici-pant’s contribution to another; for instance, if oneagent asks a question, another may respond withan answer, the two contributions then linked to-gether by the relation QAP. Conversational partic-ipants are alternatively senders (S) or receivers ofmessages (R). S sends a signal s bearing in mindthat receiver R has to figure out: (a) what is themessage m(s)? What is S publicly committedto? (b) Is m(s) credible or not? (c) Given a statusfor m(s), what signal s′ should R send in return?R now becomes sender and S, now the receiver,goes through the calculation steps (a)-(c). We as-sume that at least part of the conventional mean-ing of the signal is determined prior to game play.In calculation (a), R must calculate using a formof generalized signaling game what are the pub-lic commitments that S has made—these includenot only the fixed semantics but also the impli-catures that introduce discourse relations betweencontributions. Sometimes these involve strategicconsiderations: for instance, is S actually reply-ing to the question asked in the prior turn or is sheengaged in some other discourse move? If she isanswering the question, is this something that Scannot plausibly later deny? (Asher and Quinley,2011) argue that a trust game format is the rightone for computing optimal moves in task (c).(Traum and Allen, 1994) advocates a relatedview on which cooperativity is determined onlyby the social conventions guiding conversation,obligations that do not presuppose speakers adopteach other’s goals (Traum et al., 2008). For us,the social conventions that are foundational onTraum’s account are however themselves basedon utility. Utility is also the basis for train-ing agents to behave in a certain way throughreinforcement learning for conversational agents(Frampton and Lemon, 2009).2 Example negotiation dialogueWe provide a sample annotation of a negotiationdialogue (table (1) from our corpus, which con-sists of recorded chat negotiations taking placeduring on-line games of The Settlers of Catan,1a popular boardgame. The annotations are done1See the original game on www.catan.com, adaptedby us on homepages.inf.ed.ac.uk/mguhe/socl/Speaker Id Turn Dom. function Rhet. function PrefsEuan 47 [And I alt tab back from the tutorial.] 1 OTHER[What’s up?] 2 OTHER Result*(47 1,47 2)Joel 48 [do you want to trade?] OFFER Q-elab(47 2, 48)〈Joel,?,?,Euan〉Card. 49 [joel fancies a bit of your clay] STRAT.-COMMENT Expl*(48, 49) Pref(joel)Joel 50 [yes] OTHER Ackn(49, 50)Joel 51 [!] OTHER Comment(50, 51)Euan 52 [Whatcha got?] COUNTEROFFER Q-elab([48-50], 52)〈Euan,?,?,Joel〉Joel 53 [wheat] HAS-RESOURCES QAP(52, 53)〈Joel,wheat〉Euan 54 [I can wheat for clay.] COUNTEROFFER Elab([52,53], 54)〈Euan,wheat,clay,Joel〉Joel 55 [awesome] ACCEPT(54) Ackn(54, 55)Table 1: Example annotation, with offer arguments: offerer, requested resource, offered resource, receiver.using the GLOZZ tool developed by the Univer-sity of Caen.2Our annotation model features both a discoursestructure level (DS) and a dialogue act (DA) level,which categorizes elementary discourse units orEDUs, given by a pre-annotation, relative to theirrole in negotiations. DS encodes communicativefunctions of EDUs or clusters of EDUs using therelations of (Asher and Lascarides, 2003), simi-lar to but more detailed than DAMSL’s (Core andAllen, 1997). Unlike (Sidner, 1994), which alsoprovides domain level acts for negotiations, oursemantics for DAs does not assume Gricean coop-erativity. Our DAs are: OFFER, COUNTEROFFER,STRATEGIC COMMENT a comment about a playin the game, OTHER. Each act also comes withan annotation of resources that are offered, re-quested, or simply possessed. With respect to thediscourse relations, Expl* and Result* stand for“metalinguistic” relations: Result*(47 1, 47 2)means that the action described in 47 1 causes thespeech act of asking the question in 47 2. Sim-ilarly, Expl*(48,49) indicates that Cardlinger ex-plains why Joel asked the question in EDU 48.Q-elab is the relation of follow up question or Q-elab, and Ackn stands for the acknowledgment re-lation, while QAP stands for Question-Answer-Pair. The semantics for all these relations can befound in (Asher and Lascarides, 2003).Our annotators received training over 22 nego-tiation dialogues with 560 turns. The inter annota-tion agreement at both EDU and rhetorical struc-ture levels for this training will be used to refinethe guidelines. In over 91 instances of doubly-annotated EDUs considered, we have a kappa of0.54, a moderate level due to the very high num-2www.glozz.orgber of “other” acts . For rhetorical structure, usingan exact match criterion of success (easy to com-pute but harsher than necessary), we have a Kappaof 0.45. These figures are very preliminary.ReferencesJ. Allen and D. Litman. 1987. A plan recognitionmodel for subdialogues in conversations. CognitiveScience, 11(2):163–200.N. Asher and A. Lascarides. 2003. Logics of Conver-sation. Cambridge University Press.N. Asher and J. Quinley. 2011. Begging questions,their answers and basic cooperativity. In LENLS 8,Japan.M. Core and J. Allen. 1997. Coding dialogs with thedamsl annotation scheme. In Working Notes of theAAAI Fall Symposium on Communicative actions inHumans and Machines, pages 28–35, Cambridge,MA.M. Frampton and O. Lemon. 2009. Recent re-search advances in reinforcement learning in spo-ken dialogue systems. Knowledge Eng. Review,24(4):375–408.K. E. Lochbaum. 1998. A collaborative planningmodel of intentional structure. Computational Lin-guistics, 24(4):525–572.C. Sidner. 1994. An artificial discourse language forcollaborative negotiation. In AAAI, volume 1, pages814–819. MIT Press, Cambridge.D. Traum and J. Allen. 1994. Discourse obligationsin dialogue processing. In ACL94, pages 1–8, LasCruces, New Mexico.D. Traum, W. Swartout, J. Gratch, and S. Marsella.2008. A virtual human dialogue model for non-team interaction. In L. Dybkjr, W. Minker, andN. Ide, editors, Recent Trends in Discourse and Di-alogue, volume 39 of Text, Speech and LanguageTechnology, pages 45–67. Springer Netherlands.

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