In this paper, we propose a general and abstract formal setting for argumentative dialogue protocols. We identify a minimal set of basic parameters that characterize dialogue protocols. By combining three parameters, namely the possibility or not of backtracking, the number of moves per turn and the turn-taking of the agents, we identify eight classes of protocols. We show that those classes ca...

Reinforcement learning tasks are typically specified as Markov decision processes. This formalism has been highly successful, though specifications often couple the dynamics of the environment and the learning objective. This lack of modularity can complicate generalization of the task specification, as well as obfuscate connections between different task settings, such as episodic and continui...

The relationship between a theory of learning and a theory of instruction is discussed. Examples are presented that illustrate how to proceed from a theoretical description of the learning process to the specification of an optimal strategy for carrying out instruction. The examples deal with fairly simple learning tasks and are admittedly of limited generality. Nevertheless, they clearly defin...

We propose a generative model for automatic query reformulations from an initial query using the underlying subtopic structure of top ranked retrieved documents. We address two types of query reformulations a) specification where the reformulated query expresses a more particular information need compared to the previous query; and b) generalization where the query is reformulated to retrieve m...