This paper discusses the problem of generating communicatively adequate responses in information seeking dialogues and advocates the Constructive Dialogue Management (CDM) approach, which is an advance on previous research in that communicative principles are explicitly taken into consideration. Communicative principles are general inference rules which describe rational, cooperative action in ...

Complex social communication is expected to evolve whenever animals engage in many and varied social interactions; that is, sociality should promote communicative complexity. Yet, informal comparisons among phylogenetically independent taxonomic groups seem to cast doubt on the putative role of social factors in the evolution of complex communication. Here, we provide a formal test of the socia...

\Ve view communication as action aimed at increasing the efficiency of interaction among multiple agents. Thus, we postulate that a speaker design a speech act so as to maximally increase the benefit it obtains as the result of the interaction. This paper presents a theoretical framework which can be used by this kind of the design process. Our framework consists of a representation of an epist...

Predictive processes are crucial not only for interpreting the actions of individual agents, but also to predict how, in the context of a social interaction between two agents, the actions of one agent relate to the actions of a second agent. In the present study we investigated whether, in the context of a communicative interaction between two agents, observers can use the actions of one agent...

BACKGROUND In the context of interacting activities requiring close-body contact such as fighting or dancing, the actions of one agent can be used to predict the actions of the second agent. In the present study, we investigated whether interpersonal predictive coding extends to interactive activities--such as communicative interactions--in which no physical contingency is implied between the m...

BACKGROUND Communication of autistic children. AIM To assess the communication functionality of verbal and non-verbal children of the autistic spectrum and to identify possible associations amongst the groups. METHOD Subjects were 20 children of the autistic spectrum divided into two groups: V with 10 verbal children and NV with 10 non-verbal children with ages varying between 2y10m and 10y...

The creation of conversational agents capable of expressive and communicative behaviors requires to define the relationship between the agent’s communicative intentions and how these intentions are expressed in a coordinated verbal and nonverbal message. Suppose an agent S (a Sender) has the goal of communicating something to an interlocutor A (Addressee) in a particular situation and context; ...

Rett syndrome (RTT) is a severe neurological disorder characterized by a developmental regression in motor and speech-language domains. There is, however, limited research on socio-communicative development of affected children before the onset of regression. We analyzed audio-video recordings made by parents of six 9- to 12-month old girls later diagnosed with typical RTT, applying the Invento...

This work is aimed at suggesting methodological foundations for following Nursing student's progress in communicative competence. Using qualitative methodology and theoretical reference of interpersonal communication, the research was developed through interviews with 13 professors with experience both in teaching activities and communication research in Nursing. Interviewees reported that they...

We study the problem of generating an English sentence given an underlying probabilistic grammar, a world and a communicative goal. We model the generation problem as a Markov decision process with a suitably defined reward function that reflects the communicative goal. We then use probabilistic planning to solve the MDP and generate a sentence that, with high probability, accomplishes the comm...