The Fluent Calculus has largely been focused on building agents that work individually. However, agents often need to interact with each other to learn more about their environment as well as to achieve their goals. One form of interaction is by means of communication. Effective, goal–oriented communication requires knowledge of other agents. This paper studies the problem of endowing agents wi...

A unique hallmark of human language is that it uses signals that are both learnt and symbolic. The emergence of such signals was therefore a defining event in human cognitive evolution, yet very little is known about how such a process occurs. Previous work provides some insights on how meaning can become attached to form, but a more foundational issue is presently unaddressed. How does a signa...

This study explores the potential of utilising certain prosodic qualities of function-specific vocal expressions in order to design effective non-speech user interface sounds. In an empirical setting, utterances with four context-situated communicative functions were produced by 20 participants. Time series of fundamental frequency (F0) and intensity were extracted from the utterances and analy...

The present research aims to investigate the distinction between simple and complex communicative acts in the context of extralinguistic communication. We propose that, within the same pragmatic phenomena studied which are standard communicative acts, deceit and irony a simple communicative act is easier to comprehend than a complex one. Our proposal is based on the different complexity of infe...

Resilience thinkers share an interest in collaborative deliberation with communicative planners, who aim to accommodate different forms of knowledge and styles of reasoning to promote social learning and yield creative and equitable agreements. Members of both fields attended a symposium at Virginia Tech in late 2008, where communicative planners considered how social–ecological resilience info...

\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; ...