Speech Acts for Dialogue Agents

A dialogue agent is one that can interact and communicate with other agents in a coherent manner not just with one shot messages but with a sequence of related messages all on the same topic or in service of an overall goal Following the basic insights of speech act theory these communications are seen not just as transmitting information but as actions which change the state of the world Most of these changes will be to the mental states of the agents involved in the conversation as well as the state or context of the dialogue As such speech act theory allows an agent theorist or designer to place agent communication within the same general framework as agent action In general though communicative action requires a more expressive logic of action than is required for something like the single agent blocks world familiar in classical AI planning For one thing there are multiple agents and there is also a possibility of simultaneous and fallible action In studying speech acts the focus is on pragmatics rather than semantics that is how language is used by agents not what the messages themselves mean in terms of truth conditions in a model see for a good introduction to issues in natural language pragmatics As with other aspects of pragmatics such as implicature and presupposition an important concern is what can be inferred perhaps only provisionally or with a certain likelihood as a result of the performance of a speech act While much of speech act work has been analyzing interaction in natural language speech acts are also a convenient level of analysis for arti cial communication languages While the rules for interpreting whether a particular act has been performed will be di erent for an arti cial language presumably simpler with less concern about vague and