Related papers: The Role of Cognitive Modeling in Achieving Commun…

Research in discourse processing has identified two representational requirements for discourse planning systems. First, discourse plans must adequately represent the intentional structure of the utterances they produce in order to enable a…

A discourse strategy is a strategy for communicating with another agent. Designing effective dialogue systems requires designing agents that can choose among discourse strategies. We claim that the design of effective strategies must take…

We develop a qualitative model of decision making with two aims: to describe how people make simple decisions and to enable computer programs to do the same. Current approaches based on Planning or Decisions Theory either ignore uncertainty…

This paper presents a computational model of how conversational participants collaborate in order to make a referring action successful. The model is based on the view of language as goal-directed behavior. We propose that the content of a…

Language understanding (LU) and dialogue policy learning are two essential components in conversational systems. Human-human dialogues are not well-controlled and often random and unpredictable due to their own goals and speaking habits.…

Recent debates over adults' theory of mind use have been fueled by surprising failures of perspective-taking in communication, suggesting that perspective-taking can be relatively effortful. How, then, should speakers and listeners allocate…

This paper shows how agents' choice in communicative action can be designed to mitigate the effect of their resource limits in the context of particular features of a collaborative planning task. I first motivate a number of hypotheses…

Responses in task-oriented dialogue systems often realize multiple propositions whose ultimate form depends on the use of sentence planning and discourse structuring operations. For example a recommendation may consist of an explicitly…

Prior approaches to realizing mixed-initiative human--computer referential communication have adopted information-state or collaborative problem-solving approaches. In this paper, we argue for a new approach, inspired by coherence-based…

Building a socially intelligent agent involves many challenges. One of which is to track the agent's mental state transition and teach the agent to make decisions guided by its value like a human. Towards this end, we propose to incorporate…

This paper presents a message planner, TraumaGEN, that draws on rhetorical structure and discourse theory to address the problem of producing integrated messages from individual critiques, each of which is designed to achieve its own…

Deliberation plays an important role in the design of rational agents embedded in the real-world. In particular, deliberation leads to the formation of intentions, i.e., plans of action that the agent is committed to achieving. In this…

We present a joint modeling approach to identify salient discussion points in spoken meetings as well as to label the discourse relations between speaker turns. A variation of our model is also discussed when discourse relations are treated…

We consider communication when there is no agreement about symbols and meanings. We treat it within the framework of reinforcement learning. We apply different reinforcement learning models in our studies and simplify the problem as much as…

Large language models have enabled agents of all kinds to interact with users through natural conversation. Consequently, agents now have two jobs: conversing and planning/reasoning. Their conversational responses must be informed by all…

Explaining how to get from A to B can be challenging. It requires mentally simulating what the listener will do based on what they are told. To capture this process, we propose a computational model that converts utterances into action…

Probabilistic mental simulation is thought to play a key role in human reasoning, planning, and prediction, yet the demands of simulation in complex environments exceed realistic human capacity limits. A theory with growing evidence is that…

Building a persona-based conversation agent is challenging owing to the lack of large amounts of speaker-specific conversation data for model training. This paper addresses the problem by proposing a multi-task learning approach to training…

Goal-oriented conversational agents are becoming prevalent in our daily lives. For these systems to engage users and achieve their goals, they need to exhibit appropriate social behavior as well as provide informative replies that guide…

Modern language models predict the next token in the sequence by considering the past text through a powerful function such as attention. However, language models have no explicit mechanism that allows them to spend computation time for…