Related papers: The Computational Structure of Unintentional Meani…
Discourse signals are often implicit, leaving it up to the interpreter to draw the required inferences. At the same time, discourse is embedded in a social context, meaning that interpreters apply their own assumptions and beliefs when…
One goal of Artificial Intelligence is to learn meaningful representations for natural language expressions, but what this entails is not always clear. A variety of new linguistic behaviours present themselves embodied as computers,…
We integrate foundational theories of meaning with a mathematical formalism of artificial general intelligence (AGI) to offer a comprehensive mechanistic explanation of meaning, communication, and symbol emergence. This synthesis holds…
Human dialogue often contains utterances having meanings entirely different from the sentences used and are clearly understood by the interlocutors. But in human-computer interactions, the machine fails to understand the implicated meaning…
Discourse involves two perspectives: a person's intention in making an utterance and others' perception of that utterance. The misalignment between these perspectives can lead to undesirable outcomes, such as misunderstandings, low…
Human communication often involves the use of verbal irony or sarcasm, where the speakers usually mean the opposite of what they say. To better understand how verbal irony is expressed by the speaker and interpreted by the hearer we conduct…
We outline how utterances in dialogs can be interpreted using a partial first order logic. We exploit the capability of this logic to talk about the truth status of formulae to define a notion of coherence between utterances and explain how…
This paper is about the flow of inference between communicative intentions, discourse structure and the domain during discourse processing. We augment a theory of discourse interpretation with a theory of distinct mental attitudes and…
Analyzing how human beings resolve syntactic ambiguity has long been an issue of interest in the field of linguistics. It is, at the same time, one of the most challenging issues for spoken language understanding (SLU) systems as well. As…
Human speakers have an extensive toolkit of ways to express themselves. In this paper, we engage with an idea largely absent from discussions of meaning in natural language understanding--namely, that the way something is expressed reflects…
While we do not always use words, communicating what we want to an AI is a conversation -- with ourselves as well as with it, a recurring loop with optional steps depending on the complexity of the situation and our request. Any given…
Agents are a special kind of AI-based software in that they interact in complex environments and have increased potential for emergent behaviour. Explaining such emergent behaviour is key to deploying trustworthy AI, but the increasing…
Artificial intelligence systems exhibit many useful capabilities, but they appear to lack understanding. This essay describes how we could go about constructing a machine capable of understanding. As John Locke (1689) pointed out words are…
Large language models often respond to ambiguous requests by implicitly committing to one interpretation, frustrating users and creating safety risks when that interpretation is wrong. We propose generating a single structured response that…
Humans have the fascinating capacity of processing non-verbal visual cues to understand and anticipate the actions of other humans. This "intention reading" ability is underpinned by shared motor-repertoires and action-models, which we use…
Recent advances in computational cognitive science (i.e., simulation-based probabilistic programs) have paved the way for significant progress in formal, implementable models of pragmatics. Rather than describing a pragmatic reasoning…
Recognizing a basic difference between the semiotics of humans and machines presents a possibility to overcome the shortcomings of current speech assistive devices. For the machine, the meaning of a (human) utterance is defined by its own…
Children's early speech often bears little resemblance to that of adults, and yet parents and other caregivers are able to interpret that speech and react accordingly. Here we investigate how these adult inferences as listeners reflect…
Pragmatics and non-literal language understanding are essential to human communication, and present a long-standing challenge for artificial language models. We perform a fine-grained comparison of language models and humans on seven…
The notion of face described by Brown and Levinson (1987) has been studied in great detail, but a critical aspect of the framework, that which focuses on how intentions mediate the planning of turns which impose upon face, has received far…