We address the issue of rational communicative behavior among autonomous intelligent agents that have to make decisions as to what, to whom, and how to communicate. We treat communicative actions as aimed at increasing the eeciency of interaction among agents. We postulate that a rational speaker design a speech act so as to maximally increase the beneet obtained as the result of the interactio...

In this paper, we apply concept learning techniques to solve a number of problems in the customer relationship management (CRM) domain. We present a concept learning technique to tackle common scenarios of interaction between conflicting human agents (such as customers and customer support representatives). Scenarios are represented by directed graphs with labeled vertices (for communicative ac...

The principle of rationality has been invoked to explain that infants expect agents to perform the most efficient means action to attain a goal. It has also been demonstrated that infants take into account the efficiency of observed actions to achieve a goal outcome when deciding whether to reenact a specific behavior or not. It is puzzling, however, that they also tend to imitate an apparently...

actions are decomposed until primitive communicative actions (executable as speech acts) are reached. In performing this task, the text planner relies on the set of explanation strategies that specify possible decompositions for each communicative action and the constraints dictating when they may be applied. These constraints are checked against the solution graph and when they are satisfied t...

The human hands form very unique and versatile parts of the body. They explore the environment via tactile and haptic feedback, they manipulate the environment and they communicate with interlocutors. The movements of the hands thus provide the receptive observer with information about the current sensory information state, the current actions or the communicative intent of a subject. Scientifi...

Cooperation is a complex task that necessarily involves communication and reasoning about others’ intentions and beliefs. Multi-agent communication languages aid designers of cooperating robots through standardized speech acts, sometimes including a formal semantics. But a more direct approach would be to have the robots plan both regular and communicative actions themselves. We show how two ro...

We describe the generation of communicative actions in an implemented embodied conversational agent. Our agent plans each utterance so that multiple communicative goals may be realized opportunistically by a composite action including not only speech but also coverbal gesture that fits the context and the ongoing speech in ways representative of natural human conversation. We accomplish this by...

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...

There are two fundamentally different ways to attribute intentional mental states to others upon observing their actions. Actions can be interpreted as goal-directed, which warrants ascribing intentions, desires and beliefs appropriate to the observed actions, to the agents. Recent studies suggest that young infants also tend to interpret certain actions in terms of goals, and their reasoning a...