Abstract not found

Electronic messaging—whether in an office environment or for electronic commerce—is normally carried out in natural language, even when supported by information systems. For a variety of reasons it would be useful if electronic messaging systems could have semantic access to, i.e., have access to the meanings and contents of, the messages they process. Given that natural language understanding is not a practicable alternative, there remain three approaches to delivering systems with semantic access: electronic data interchange (EDI), tagged messages, and the development of a formal language for business communication (FLBC). We favor the latter approach. In this paper we compare and contrast these three approaches, present a theoretical basis for an FLBC (using speech act theory), and describe a prototype implementation.

Speech act theory is important not only in Linguistics, but also in Computer Science. It has applications in Distributed Computing, Distributed Artificial Intelligence, Natural Language Processing, and Electronic Data Interchange protocols. While much research into speech acts has been done, one aspect of them that has largely been ignored is their semantics, i.e., their conditions of satisfaction. A formal semantics for speech acts is motivated and presented here that relates their satisfaction to the intentions, know-how, and actions of the participating agents. This makes it possible to state several potentially useful constraints on communication and provides a basis for checking their consistency. An earlier version of this paper was presented at the Second Meeting on the Mathematics of Language, Tarrytown, NY, May 1991. Some parts of this paper overlap with [23]. y This research was supported by the National Science Foundation (through grant # IRI-8945845 to the Center for Co...

Agents in multiagent systems interact to a large extent by communicating. Such communication may be fruitfully studied from the point of view of speech act theory. In order for multiagent systems to be formally and rigorously designed and analyzed, a semantics of speech acts that gives their objective modeltheoretic conditions of satisfaction is needed. However, most research into multiagent systems that deals with communication provides only informal descriptions of the different message types used. And this problem is not addressed at all by traditional speech act theory or by AI research into discourse understanding. I provide a formal semantics for the major kinds of speech acts at a level that has not been considered before. The resulting theory applies uniformly to a wide range of multiagent systems. Some applications of this theory are outlined, and some of its theorems listed. 1

The central problem for pragmatics is that sentence meaning vastly underdetermines speaker’s meaning. The goal of pragmatics is to explain how the gap between sentence meaning and speaker’s meaning is bridged. This paper defends the broadly Gricean view that pragmatic interpretation is ultimately an exercise in mind-reading, involving the inferential attribution of intentions. We argue, however, that the interpretation process does not simply consist in applying general mind-reading abilities to a particular (communicative) domain. Rather, it involves a dedicated comprehension module, with its own special principles and mechanisms. We show how such a metacommunicative module might have evolved, and what principles and mechanisms it might contain.

Conversation protocols are used to achieve certain goals or to bring about certain states in the world. Therefore, one may identify the landmarks or the states that must be brought about during the goal-directed execution of a protocol. Accordingly, the landmarks, characterized by propositions that are true in the state represented by that landmark, are the most important aspect of a protocol. Families of conversation protocols can be expressed formally as partially ordered landmarks after the landmarks necessary to achieve a goal have been identified. Concrete protocols represented as joint action expressions can, then, be derived from the partially ordered landmarks and executed directly by joint intention interpreters. This approach of applying Joint Intention theory to protocols also supports flexibility in the actions used to get to landmarks, shortcutting protocol execution, automatic exception handling, and correctness criterion for protocols and protocol compositions. 1.

A framework for designing a multiagent system (MAS) in which agents are capable of coordinating their activities in routine, familiar, and unfamiliar situations is proposed. This framework is based on the skills, rules and knowledge (S-R-K) taxonomy of Rasmussen. Thus, the proposed framework should allow agents to prefer the lower skill-based and rule-based levels rather than the higher knowledge-based level because it is generally easier to obtain and maintain coordination between agents in routine and familiar situations than in unfamiliar situations. The framework should also support each of the three levels because complex tasks combined with complex interactions require all levels. To permit agents to rely on low levels, a suggestions is developed: agents are provided with social laws so as to guarantee coordination between agents and minimize the need for calling a central coordinator or for engaging in negotiation which requires intense communication. Finally, implemen...

This paper is designed to illustrate and consider the relations between three types of metarepresentational ability used in verbal comprehension: the ability to metarepresent attributed thoughts, the ability to metarepresent attributed utterances, and the ability to metarepresent abstract, non-attributed representations (e.g. sentence types, utterance types, propositions). Aspects of these abilities have been separately considered in the literatures on “theory of mind”, Gricean pragmatics and quotation. The aim of this paper is to show how the results of these separate strands of research might be integrated with an empirically plausible pragmatic theory. 1

To decide how to respond to an utterance, a speaker must interpret what others have said and why they have said it. Speakers rely on their expectations to decide whether they have understood each other. Misunderstandings occur when speakers differ in their beliefs about what has been said or why. If a listener hears something that seems inconsistent, he may reinterpret an earlier utterance and respond to it anew. Otherwise, he assumes that the conversation is proceeding smoothly. Recognizing an inconsistency as a misunderstanding and generating a new reply together accomplish what is known as a fourth-position repair. To model the repair of misunderstandings, this thesis combines both intentional and social accounts of discourse, unifying theories of speech act production, interpretation, and repair. In intentional accounts, speakers use their beliefs, goals, and expectations to decide what to say; when they interpret an utterance, speakers identify goals that might account for it. In...

It is widely accepted that there is a distinction to be made between the explicit content and the implicit import of an utterance. There is much less agreement about the precise nature of this distinction, how it is to be drawn, and whether any such two-way distinction can do justice to the levels and kinds of meaning involved in utterance interpretation. Grice's distinction between what is said by an utterance and what is implicated is probably the best known instantiation of the explicit/implicit distinction. His distinction, along with many of its post-Gricean heirs, is closely entwined with another distinction: that between semantics and pragmatics. Indeed, on some construals they are seen as essentially one and the same; "what is said" is equated with the truthconditional content of the utterance which in turn is equated with (context-relative) sentence meaning, leaving implicatures (conventional and conversational) as the sole domain of pragmatics. This is emphatica