When established communication systems cannot be used, people rapidly create novel systems to modify the mental state of another agent according to their intentions. However, there are dramatic inter-individual differences in the implementation of this human competence for communicative innovation. Here we characterize psychological sources of inter-individual variability in the ability to buil...

Studies of dogs report that individuals reliably respond to the goal-directed communicative actions (e.g., pointing) of human experimenters. All of these studies use some version of a multi-trial approach, thereby allowing for the possibility of rapid learning within an experimental session. The experiments reported here ask whether dogs can respond correctly to a communicative action based on ...

We provide an eclectic generic framework to understand the back and forth interactions between participants in a conversation highlighting the complexity of the actions that listeners are engaged in. Communicative actions of one participant implicate the “other” in many ways. In this paper, we try to enumerate some essential relevant dimensions of this reciprocal dependence.

We build a generic methodology based on learning and reasoning to detect specific attitudes of human agents and patterns of their interactions. Human attitudes are determined in terms of communicative actions of agents; models of machine learning are used when it is rather hard to identify attitudes in a rulebased form directly. We employ scenario knowledge representation and learning technique...

The research reported here is part of an ongoing eeort to design systems which can automatically generate integrated text and information graphics presentations. We are investigating the integration of two complementary approaches: hierarchical planning and task-based graphic design. A hierarchical planner is used to construct a media-independent plan of illocutionary actions which are ultimate...

The physical actions performed by any robot can be used to convey meaning to a user in human-robot interaction. For example, successfully performing an action following a request may be viewed as an acceptance, while performing the wrong action may be construed as a mis-understanding. Even hesitating to perform a requested physical action may be viewed as a signal of non-understanding. Thus, un...

While intentions are at the center of communication theories such as Relevance Theory, and also of theories of action in general, the interaction between communicative and non-communicative intentions has not been much investigated within the relevance-theoretic framework. This paper discusses Bratman’s (1987) Theory of Planning, which recognizes the critical role of intentions in governing our...

Communicative action concerns achieving and maintaining mutual understanding among all those who are involved in a coordinated (organizational) situation. Communicative action is embedded in a social context. Current approaches in the Language/Action Perspective have focused mainly on the dynamic aspect of language, that is, on (business) conversation. In this paper, we develop a new model of c...

This paper presents a plan-based model of dialogue that combines world, linguistic, and contextual knowledge in order to recognize complex communicative actions such as expressing doubt. Linguistic knowledge suggests certain discourse acts, a speaker's beliefs, aud the strength of those beliefs; contextual knowledge suggests the most coherent continuation of the dialogue; and world knowledge pr...