Uptake by Conditional Obligations

Dialogues are generated in a joint process of offering and accepting moves. Depending on the dialogue genre, there is usually one participant who takes the initiative; other participants respond to the initiative. In this paper, we further investigate the process of uptake [1, 4]. Essentially, an initiative is ambivalent. The way in which an initiative is ‘taken up’, allows the responder to modify the course of a dialogue. In section 2 we introduce dialogue games. Section 3 analyzes the uptake mechanism as a negotiation of the dialogue game at a meta-level. Section 4 provides a formalization of dialogue games, that can be translated into rules for the individual participants [5]. To deal with possible conflicts, we express such rules as conditional obligations in the boid cognitive agent architecture [2]. Section 5 shows how the uptake mechanism can be expressed in this framework.