We describe the generation of communicative actions in an implemented embodied conversational agent. Our agent plans each utterance so that multiple communicative goals may be realized opportunistically by a composite action including not only speech but also coverbal gesture that fits the context and the ongoing speech in ways representative of natural human conversation. We accomplish this by...

interaction systems engaging in communicative action using a variety of media. There was some interesting discussion about how the resources and constraints of machine communicative partners differ from humanhuman communication. Another important issue was the role of context, which motivated a joint session with the symposium on Context in Knowledge Representation and Natural Language Processi...

While intentions are at the center of communication theories such as Relevance Theory, and also of theories of action in general, the interaction between communicative and non-communicative intentions has not been much investigated within the relevance-theoretic framework. This paper discusses Bratman’s (1987) Theory of Planning, which recognizes the critical role of intentions in governing our...

Individuals are active audience members that use Internet-based social media technologies to create and negotiate social action in online spaces. Communicative informatics is the key to constructing, describing or critiquing social media. Communicative informatics is the discovery of the audience, text/image, technology, negotiated place relationships that create symbolic meaning. Four proposit...

actions are decomposed until primitive communicative actions (executable as speech acts) are reached. In performing this task, the text planner relies on the set of explanation strategies that specify possible decompositions for each communicative action and the constraints dictating when they may be applied. These constraints are checked against the solution graph and when they are satisfied t...

By the performance of language acts, participants in an organisation initiate action and report about results. An unambiguous interpretation of these language acts is important for the modelling of business communication. In the actual realisation of business conversations the communicative intention of the speaker often differs from the grammatical meaning of the sentence. This paper focuses o...

Linguistic communication builds on prelinguistic communicative gestures, but the ontogenetic origins and complexities of these prelinguistic gestures are not well known. The current study tested whether 8-month-olds, who do not yet point communicatively, use instrumental actions for communicative purposes. In two experiments, infants reached for objects when another person was present and when ...

We are currently implementing CIRCSIM-Tutor v. 3, a natural-language based intelligent tutoring system (ITS) which tutors medical students on a topic in cardiovascular physiology (the baroreceptor reflex). We outline the text generation process in CIRCSIM-Tutor and illustrate a number of issues we have faced with respect to the representation of communicative action.