Related papers: Rationality, Cooperation and Conversational Implic…
Words (phrases or symbols) play a key role in human life. Word (phrase or symbol) representation is the fundamental problem for knowledge representation and understanding. A word (phrase or symbol) usually represents a name of a category.…
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…
Computability logic is a formal theory of computational tasks and resources. Its formulas represent interactive computational problems, logical operators stand for operations on computational problems, and validity of a formula is…
We have recently begun a project to develop a more effective and efficient way to marshal inferences from background knowledge to facilitate deep natural language understanding. The meaning of a word is taken to be the entities,…
A plausible definition of "reasoning" could be "algebraically manipulating previously acquired knowledge in order to answer a new question". This definition covers first-order logical inference or probabilistic inference. It also includes…
I consider decision-making constrained by considerations of morality, rationality, or other virtues. The decision maker (DM) has a true preference over outcomes, but feels compelled to choose among outcomes that are top-ranked by some…
The Expansion property considered by researchers in Social Choice is shown to correspond to a logical property of nonmonotonic consequence relations that is the {\em pure}, i.e., not involving connectives, version of a previously known weak…
When a decision, such as the approval or denial of a bank loan, is delegated to a computer, an explanation of that decision ought to be given with it. This ethical need to explain the decisions leads to the search for a formal definition of…
Multimodal conversational interfaces provide a natural means for users to communicate with computer systems through multiple modalities such as speech and gesture. To build effective multimodal interfaces, automated interpretation of user…
We show that explicit pragmatic inference aids in correctly generating and following natural language instructions for complex, sequential tasks. Our pragmatics-enabled models reason about why speakers produce certain instructions, and…
Language models (LMs) are said to be exhibiting reasoning, but what does this entail? We assess definitions of reasoning and how key papers in the field of natural language processing (NLP) use the notion and argue that the definitions…
Argumentation theory is a powerful paradigm that formalizes a type of commonsense reasoning that aims to simulate the human ability to resolve a specific problem in an intelligent manner. A classical argumentation process takes into account…
Drawing appropriate defeasible inferences has been proven to be one of the most pervasive puzzles of natural language processing and a recurrent problem in pragmatics. This paper provides a theoretical framework, called ``stratified…
Language models learn and represent language differently than humans; they learn the form and not the meaning. Thus, to assess the success of language model explainability, we need to consider the impact of its divergence from a user's…
Norms are essential to extend inference: inferences based on norms are far richer than those based on logical implications. In the recent decades, much effort has been devoted to reason on a domain, once its norms are represented. How to…
When we communicate with other humans, we do not simply generate a sequence of words. Rather, we use our cognitive state (beliefs, desires, intentions) and our model of the audience's cognitive state to create utterances that affect the…
Imitation learning is a proven method for creating a policy in the absence of rewards, by leveraging expert demonstrations. In this work, we apply imitation learning to conversation. In doing so, we recover a policy capable of talking to a…
In systems modelling, a 'system' typically comprises located resources relative to which processes execute. One important use of logic in informatics is in modelling such systems for the purpose of reasoning (perhaps automated) about their…
What computational principles underlie human pragmatic reasoning? A prominent approach to pragmatics is the Rational Speech Act (RSA) framework, which formulates pragmatic reasoning as probabilistic speakers and listeners recursively…
Understanding interpersonal communication requires, in part, understanding the social context and norms in which a message is said. However, current methods for identifying offensive content in such communication largely operate independent…