Related papers: Rationality, Cooperation and Conversational Implic…
Effective communication is essential in collaborative tasks, so AI-equipped robots working alongside humans need to be able to explain their behaviour in order to cooperate effectively and earn trust. We analyse and classify communications…
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…
This paper is a reflexion on the computability of natural language semantics. It does not contain a new model or new results in the formal semantics of natural language: it is rather a computational analysis of the logical models and…
Why is ordinary language vague? We argue that in contexts in which a cooperative speaker is not perfectly informed about the world, the use of vague expressions can offer an optimal tradeoff between truthfulness (Gricean Quality) and…
Session types describe the structure of communications implemented by channels. In particular, they prescribe the sequence of communications, whether they are input or output actions, and the type of value exchanged. Crucial to any language…
Weighted abduction computes hypotheses that explain input observations. A reasoner of weighted abduction first generates possible hypotheses and then selects the hypothesis that is the most plausible. Since a reasoner employs parameters,…
A simple framework for reasoning under uncertainty and intervention is introduced. This is achieved in three steps. First, logic is restated in set-theoretic terms to obtain a framework for reasoning under certainty. Second, this framework…
Language technologies that accurately model the dynamics of events must perform commonsense reasoning. Existing work evaluating commonsense reasoning focuses on making inferences about common, everyday situations. To instead investigate the…
Why do we give the explanations we do? Recent work has suggested that we should think of explanation as a kind of cooperative social interaction, between a why-question-asker and an explainer. Here, we apply this perspective to consider the…
Basic results in combinatorial mathematics provide the foundation for a theory and calculus for reasoning about sequential behavior. A key concept of the theory is a generalization of Boolean implicant which deals with statements of the…
Causality is omnipresent in scientists' verbalisations of their understanding, even though we have no formal consensual scientific definition for it. In Automata Networks, it suffices to say that automata "influence" one another to…
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…
Inspired by e-participation systems, in this paper we propose a new model to represent human debates and methods to obtain collective conclusions from them. This model overcomes drawbacks of existing approaches by allowing users to…
The development of logic has largely been through the 'deductive' paradigm: conclusions are inferred from established premisses. However, the use of logic in the context of both human and machine reasoning is typically through the dual…
The quality of rationales is essential in the reasoning capabilities of language models. Rationales not only enhance reasoning performance in complex natural language tasks but also justify model decisions. However, obtaining impeccable…
When people interpret text, they rely on inferences that go beyond the observed language itself. Inspired by this observation, we introduce a method for the analysis of text that takes implicitly communicated content explicitly into…
A central concept within informatics is in modelling such systems for the purpose of reasoning (perhaps automated) about their behaviour and properties. To this end, one requires an interpretation of logical formulae in terms of the…
In order to interpret the communicative intents of an utterance, it needs to be grounded in something that is outside of language; that is, grounded in world modalities. In this paper, we argue that dialogue clarification mechanisms make…
The study of rational relations is fundamental to the study of formal languages and automata theory. A rational relation is conjugate if each pair of words in the relation is conjugate (or cyclic shifts of each other). The notion of…
We examine the problem of generating definite noun phrases that are appropriate referring expressions; i.e, noun phrases that (1) successfully identify the intended referent to the hearer whilst (2) not conveying to her any false…