Related papers: Towards a Principled Representation of Discourse P…

For robots to perform a wide variety of tasks, they require a 3D representation of the world that is semantically rich, yet compact and efficient for task-driven perception and planning. Recent approaches have attempted to leverage features…

Multi-party Conversational Systems are systems with natural language interaction between one or more people or systems. From the moment that an utterance is sent to a group, to the moment that it is replied in the group by a member, several…

Implicit discourse relation recognition is a challenging task due to the absence of the necessary informative clue from explicit connectives. The prediction of relations requires a deep understanding of the semantic meanings of sentence…

Recently there has been significant interest in using causal modelling techniques to understand the structure of physical theories. However, the notion of `causation' is limiting - insisting that a physical theory must involve causal…

Inferring the abstract relational and causal structure of the world is a major challenge for reinforcement-learning (RL) agents. For humans, language--particularly in the form of explanations--plays a considerable role in overcoming this…

How can we better understand the mechanisms behind multi-turn information seeking dialogues? How can we use these insights to design a dialogue system that does not require explicit query formulation upfront as in question answering? To…

Adapting large language models to full document translation remains challenging due to the difficulty of capturing long-range dependencies and preserving discourse coherence throughout extended texts. While recent agentic machine…

In previous work we gave a mathematical foundation, referred to as DisCoCat, for how words interact in a sentence in order to produce the meaning of that sentence. To do so, we exploited the perfect structural match of grammar and…

Causal models capture cause-effect relations both qualitatively - via the graphical causal structure - and quantitatively - via the model parameters. They offer a powerful framework for analyzing and constructing processes. Here, we…

Multimodal information-gathering settings, where users collaborate with AI in dynamic environments, are increasingly common. These involve complex processes with textual and multimodal interactions, often requiring additional structural…

Conversational grounding is a collaborative mechanism for establishing mutual knowledge among participants engaged in a dialogue. This experimental study analyzes information-seeking conversations to investigate the capabilities of large…

Patterns embody repeating phenomena, and, as such, they are partly but not fully detachable from their context. 'Design patterns' and 'pattern languages' are established methods for working with patterns. They have been applied in…

Robots interacting with the physical world plan with models of physics. We advocate that robots interacting with people need to plan with models of cognition. This writeup summarizes the insights we have gained in integrating computational…

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…

Many real-world systems can be usefully represented as sets of interacting components. Examples include computational systems, such as query processors and compilers, natural systems, such as cells and ecosystems, and social systems, such…

In a previous paper, we have proposed a set of concepts, axiom schemata and algorithms that can be used by agents to learn to describe their behaviour, goals, capabilities, and environment. The current paper proposes a new set of concepts,…

We propose a novel method for selecting coherent and diverse responses for a given dialogue context. The proposed method re-ranks response candidates generated from conversational models by using event causality relations between events in…

We present a process algebra based approach to formalize the interactions of computing devices such as the representation of policies and the resolution of conflicts. As an example we specify how promises may be used in coming to an…

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…

Procedural planning, which entails decomposing a high-level goal into a sequence of temporally ordered steps, is an important yet intricate task for machines. It involves integrating common-sense knowledge to reason about complex and often…