There is a tendency to think of World Englishes in the noun form; as products rather than as processes (implying that one receives both ready-made, controlling the development of neither). Conceptualising World Englishes as processes in which one can participate as an agent raises the question of what skills are needed in their active construction. The author will argue that since culture resid...

In this paper we develop a logical framework for specifying and verifying systems of communicating agents. The framework is based on a Dynamic Linear Time Temporal Logic (DLTL). It provides a simple formalization of the communicative actions in terms of their effects and preconditions and the specification of an interaction protocol by means of temporal constraints. We adopt a social approach t...

This paper presents a plan-based model that handles negotiation subdialogues by inferring both the communicative actions that people pursue when speaking and the beliefs underlying these actions. We contend that recognizing the complex discourse actions pursued in negotiation subdialogues (e.g., expressing doubt) requires both a multi-strength belief model and a process model that combines diff...

This paper describes how a language-planning system can produce natural-language referring expressions that satisfy multiple goals. It describes a formal representation for reasoning about several agents' mutual knowledge using possible-worlds semantics and the general organization of a system that uses the formalism to reason about plans combining physical and linguistic actions at different l...

We have built a system that automatically generates camera actions for storytelling in virtual environments. Given a sequence of character actions, scene properties (like mood, tempo, etc), and a mapping from names to characters, objects, and locations in a graphical world, the goal of a camera planning system is to generate sequences of directives for the camera to satisfy derived from certain...

This paper describes a theory of language generation based on planning. To illustrate the theory, the problem of planning referring expressions is examined in detail. A theory based on planning makes it possible for one to account for noun phrases that refer, that inform the hearer of additional information, and that are coordinated with the speaker's physical actions to clarify his communicati...