Related papers: Collaborating on Referring Expressions
When humans cooperate, they frequently coordinate their activity through both verbal communication and non-verbal actions, using this information to infer a shared goal and plan. How can we model this inferential ability? In this paper, we…
In conversation, a person sometimes has to refer to an object that is not previously known to the other participant. We present a plan-based model of how agents collaborate on reference of this sort. In making a reference, an agent uses the…
We introduce a task and dataset for referring expression generation and comprehension in multi-agent embodied environments. In this task, two agents in a shared scene must take into account one another's visual perspective, which may be…
Modeling dialog as a collaborative activity consists notably in specifying the content of the Conversational Common Ground and the kind of social mental state involved. In previous work (Saget, 2006), we claim that Collective Acceptance is…
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…
Referring expressions are natural language constructions used to identify particular objects within a scene. In this paper, we propose a unified framework for the tasks of referring expression comprehension and generation. Our model is…
We present a model for pragmatically describing scenes, in which contrastive behavior results from a combination of inference-driven pragmatics and learned semantics. Like previous learned approaches to language generation, our model uses a…
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…
To develop computational agents that better communicate using their own emergent language, we endow the agents with an ability to focus their attention on particular concepts in the environment. Humans often understand an object or scene as…
In multi-agent systems, explicit cognition of teammates' decision logic serves as a critical factor in facilitating coordination. Communication (i.e., ``\textit{Tell}'') can assist in the cognitive development process by information…
We advance a novel computational model of multi-agent, cooperative joint actions that is grounded in the cognitive framework of active inference. The model assumes that to solve a joint task, such as pressing together a red or blue button,…
A discourse planner for (task-oriented) dialogue must be able to make choices about whether relevant, but optional information (for example, the "satellites" in an RST-based planner) should be communicated. We claim that effective text…
We describe a representation in a high-level transition system for policies that express a reactive behavior for the agent. We consider a target decision component that figures out what to do next and an (online) planning capability to…
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…
Communication is highly overloaded. Despite this, even young children are good at leveraging context to understand ambiguous signals. We propose a computational account of overloaded signaling from a shared agency perspective which we call…
Dialogue agents that interact with humans in situated environments need to manage referential ambiguity across multiple modalities and ask for help as needed. However, it is not clear what kinds of questions such agents should ask nor how…
The behavioral specification of an object-oriented grammar model is considered. The model is based on full lexicalization, head-orientation via valency constraints and dependency relations, inheritance as a means for non-redundant lexicon…
Most of agents that learn policy for tasks with reinforcement learning (RL) lack the ability to communicate with people, which makes human-agent collaboration challenging. We believe that, in order for RL agents to comprehend utterances…
An agent's intention often remains hidden behind the black-box nature of embodied policies. Communication using natural language statements that describe the next action can provide transparency towards the agent's behavior. We aim to…
To engage in human-like dialogue, robots require the ability to describe the objects, locations, and people in their environment, a capability known as "Referring Expression Generation." As speakers repeatedly refer to similar objects, they…