The paper discusses utterance planning in information-seeking dialogues and advocates a view of gradual speci cation of the communicative goal. In Constructive Dialogue Management, the set of beliefs that is intended to be communicated to the user is re ned with regard to communicative principles so that the utterance is relevant and appropriate in the context. Communicative principles describe...

The paper argues that the communicative system of touch includes a lexicon, an alphabet and some norms of use, and presents a research aimed at making them explicit. 104 items of touch were analysed in terms of their formational parameters, various semantic criteria, and norms of use, and some hypotheses on the structure of the communicative system of touch in Italy were tested in a pilot study...

The popularity of use-of-language testing seems to have been growing dramatically, in recent years, particularly where second language learners are involved ; and the term 'communicative testing' appears to have become a battle cry for all that is 'progressive' . By espousing communicative testing, the impression is given that one can throw off at a stroke the shackles of test irrelevance and a...

Most networked virtual communities, such as MUDs (Multi-User Domains), where people meet in a fictitious place to socialize and build worlds, have until recently been text-based. However, fueled partly by the VRML standardization of 3D graphics interchange on the internet, such environments are going graphical, displaying models of colorful locales and the people that inhabit them. When users c...

From soon after their first birthdays young children are able tomake inferences from a communicator’s referential act (e.g., pointing to a container) to her overall social goal for communication (e.g., to inform that a searched-for toy is inside; see Behne, Carpenter, & Tomasello, 2005; Behne, Liszkowski, Carpenter, & Tomasello, 2012). But in such cases the inferential distance between referent...

Agents which interact with humans on behalf of humans need a model of human social interaction in order to act appropriately. This paper is a brief description of such a model used by an agent to generate e-mail messages. 1. The problem There is a great deal of research in AI on multi-agent systems [Tambe et al. 1995; Etzioni, Lesh, & Segal 1993]. But there seems to be a growing need for agents...

Settling disputes, even disputes about meaning, by third party arbitration is different from settling them by negotiation. Moreover, disputes can be settled by a procedure in which the disputing parties follow a protocol that prohibits them from simply following their original aims. They can collectively constitute an arbitrator. This provides an alternative model for resolving differences in m...

In this paper, we describe a framework for specifying communicative multi-agent systems, using a theory of action based on the situation calculus to describe the effects of actions on the world and on the mental states of agents; and the concurrent, logic programming language ConGolog to specify the actions performed by each agent. Since ConGolog has a well-defined semantics, the specifications...

Types of utterances that belong to meta-levels of activity have been singled out in spoken task-focused dialogues between subjects accomplishing a matching task with no visual contact. The types include activity management and planning, global and local (e.g. signals of activity phase); explicit evaluation of the state of joint project, communicative utterances for conversation management; back...