Related papers: Rationality, Cooperation and Conversational Implic…
The concept of explainability is envisioned to satisfy society's demands for transparency on machine learning decisions. The concept is simple: like humans, algorithms should explain the rationale behind their decisions so that their…
Logical reasoning is central to human cognition and intelligence. It includes deductive, inductive, and abductive reasoning. Past research of logical reasoning within AI uses formal language as knowledge representation and symbolic…
Making decisions freely presupposes that there is some indeterminacy in the environment and in the decision making engine. The former is reflected on the behavioral changes due to communicating: few changes indicate rigid environments;…
A policy describes the conditions under which an action is permitted or forbidden. We show that a fragment of (multi-sorted) first-order logic can be used to represent and reason about policies. Because we use first-order logic, policies…
We propose a large language model explainability technique for obtaining faithful natural language explanations by grounding the explanations in a reasoning process. When converted to a sequence of tokens, the outputs of the reasoning…
Abductive reasoning aims to find plausible explanations for an event. This style of reasoning is critical for commonsense tasks where there are often multiple plausible explanations. Existing approaches for abductive reasoning in natural…
We conceptualize explainability in terms of logic and formula size, giving a number of related definitions of explainability in a very general setting. Our main interest is the so-called special explanation problem which aims to explain the…
Human communication is motivated: people speak, write, and create content with a particular communicative intent in mind. As a result, information that large language models (LLMs) and AI agents process is inherently framed by humans'…
Human collaborators coordinate effectively their actions through both verbal and non-verbal communication. We believe that the the same should hold for human-robot teams. We propose a formalism that enables a robot to decide optimally…
Concurrent computations resemble conversations. In a conversation, participants direct utterances at others and, as the conversation evolves, exploit the known common context to advance the conversation. Similarly, collaborating software…
Causal reasoning in relational domains is fundamental to studying real-world social phenomena in which individual units can influence each other's traits and behavior. Dynamics between interconnected units can be represented as an…
The state of the art in human computer conversation leaves something to be desired and, indeed, talking to a computer can be down-right annoying. This paper describes an approach to identifying ``opportunities for improvement'' in these…
Commonsense causality reasoning (CCR) aims at identifying plausible causes and effects in natural language descriptions that are deemed reasonable by an average person. Although being of great academic and practical interest, this problem…
A prominent challenge for modern language understanding systems is the ability to answer implicit reasoning questions, where the required reasoning steps for answering the question are not mentioned in the text explicitly. In this work, we…
The striking recent advances in eliciting seemingly meaningful language behaviour from language-only machine learning models have only made more apparent, through the surfacing of clear limitations, the need to go beyond the language-only…
Human communication often involves the use of verbal irony or sarcasm, where the speakers usually mean the opposite of what they say. To better understand how verbal irony is expressed by the speaker and interpreted by the hearer we conduct…
Although many investigators affirm a desire to build reasoning systems that behave consistently with the axiomatic basis defined by probability theory and utility theory, limited resources for engineering and computation can make a complete…
The conversational search task aims to enable a user to resolve information needs via natural language dialogue with an agent. In this paper, we aim to develop a conceptual framework of the actions and intents of users and agents explaining…
We propose analyzing conditional reasoning by appeal to a notion of intervention on a simulation program, formalizing and subsuming a number of approaches to conditional thinking in the recent AI literature. Our main results include a…
Eliciting feedback from end users of NLP models can be beneficial for improving models. However, how should we present model responses to users so they are most amenable to be corrected from user feedback? Further, what properties do users…