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489
Knowledge and Common Knowledge in a Distributed Environment
- Journal of the ACM
, 1984
"... : Reasoning about knowledge seems to play a fundamental role in distributed systems. Indeed, such reasoning is a central part of the informal intuitive arguments used in the design of distributed protocols. Communication in a distributed system can be viewed as the act of transforming the system&apo ..."
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Cited by 578 (55 self)
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: Reasoning about knowledge seems to play a fundamental role in distributed systems. Indeed, such reasoning is a central part of the informal intuitive arguments used in the design of distributed protocols. Communication in a distributed system can be viewed as the act of transforming the system's state of knowledge. This paper presents a general framework for formalizing and reasoning about knowledge in distributed systems. We argue that states of knowledge of groups of processors are useful concepts for the design and analysis of distributed protocols. In particular, distributed knowledge corresponds to knowledge that is "distributed" among the members of the group, while common knowledge corresponds to a fact being "publicly known". The relationship between common knowledge and a variety of desirable actions in a distributed system is illustrated. Furthermore, it is shown that, formally speaking, in practical systems common knowledge cannot be attained. A number of weaker variants...
Saying what you mean in dialogue: A study in conceptual and semantic co-ordination
- Cognition
, 1987
"... This paper explores how conversants co-ordinate their use and interpretation of language in a restricted context. It revolves around the analysis of the spatial descriptions which emerge during the course of 56 dialogues, elicited in the laboratory using a specially designed computer maze game. Two ..."
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Cited by 177 (9 self)
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This paper explores how conversants co-ordinate their use and interpretation of language in a restricted context. It revolves around the analysis of the spatial descriptions which emerge during the course of 56 dialogues, elicited in the laboratory using a specially designed computer maze game. Two types of analysis are reported. The first is a semantic analysis of the various types of description, which indicates how pairs of speakers develop different language schemes associated with different mental models of the maze configuration. The second analysis concerns how the communicants co-ordi-nate in developing their description schemes. The results from this study would suggest that language processing in dia-logue may be governed by local principles of interaction which have received little attention in the psychological and linguistic literature to date.
A Corpus-Based Investigation of Definite Description Use
- Computational Linguistics
, 1998
"... We present the results of a study of definite descriptions use in written texts aimed at assessing the feasibility of annotating corpora with information about definite description interpretation. We ran two experiments, in which subjects were asked to classify the uses of definite descriptions in a ..."
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Cited by 163 (43 self)
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We present the results of a study of definite descriptions use in written texts aimed at assessing the feasibility of annotating corpora with information about definite description interpretation. We ran two experiments, in which subjects were asked to classify the uses of definite descriptions in a corpus of 33 newspaper articles, containing a total of 1412 definite descriptions. We measured the agreement among annotators about the classes assigned to definite descriptions, as well as the agreement about the antecedent assigned to those definites that the annotators classified as being related to an antecedent in the text. The most interesting result of this study from a corpus annotation perspective was the rather low agreement (K=0.63) that we obtained using versions of Hawkins' and Prince's classification schemes; better results (K=0.76) were obtained using the simplified scheme proposed by Fraurud that includes only two classes, first-mention and subsequent-mention. The agreement ...
Wizard Of Oz Studies - Why And How
, 1993
"... We discuss current approaches to the development of natural language dialogue systems, and claim that they do not sufficiently consider the unique qualities of man-machine interaction as distinct from general human discourse. We conclude that empirical studies of this unique communication situation ..."
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Cited by 162 (8 self)
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We discuss current approaches to the development of natural language dialogue systems, and claim that they do not sufficiently consider the unique qualities of man-machine interaction as distinct from general human discourse. We conclude that empirical studies of this unique communication situation is required for the development of user-friendly interactive systems. One way of achieving this is through the use of so-called Wizard of Oz studies. We describe our work in this area. The focus is on the practical execution of the studies and the methodological conclusions that we have drawn on the basis of our experience. While the focus is on natural language interfaces, the methods used and the conclusions drawn from the results obtained are of relevance also to other kinds of intelligent interfaces. 1 THE NEED FOR WIZARD OF OZ STUDIES Dialogue has been an active research area for quite some time in natural language processing. It is fair to say that researchers studying dialogue and di...
Understanding by addressees and overhearers
- Cognitive Psychology
, 1989
"... In conversation speakers design their utterances to be understood against the common ground they share with their addressees-their common experience, expertise, dialect, and culture. That ordinarily gives addressees an advantage over overhearers in understanding. Addressees have an additional advant ..."
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Cited by 157 (11 self)
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In conversation speakers design their utterances to be understood against the common ground they share with their addressees-their common experience, expertise, dialect, and culture. That ordinarily gives addressees an advantage over overhearers in understanding. Addressees have an additional advantage, we pro-pose, because they can actively collaborate with speakers in reaching the mutual belief that they have understood what was said, whereas overhearers cannot. As evidence for the proposal, we looked at triples of people in which one person told another person in conversation how to arrange 12 complex figures while an over-hearer tried to arrange them too. All three began as strangers with the same background information. As predicted, addressees were more accurate at arrang-ing the figures than overhearers even when the overhearers heard every word. Other evidence suggests that the very process of understanding is different for addressees and overhearers. 8 1989 Acadermc Press, Inc. People understand each other in conversations by gathering evidence about each other’s intentions. How do they do that? The traditional view, which we will call the autonom&s view, is that they listen to the words uttered, decode them, and interpret them against what they take to be the common ground of the participants in the conversation (e.g., Anderson,
References in conversations between experts and novices.
- Journal of Experimental Psychology: General,
, 1987
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Speaking while monitoring addressees for understanding
- JOURNAL OF MEMORY AND LANGUAGE
, 2004
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Understanding Metaphorical Comparisons: Beyond Similarity
- in Psychological Review
, 1990
"... Traditionally, metaphors such as "my job is a jail " have been treated as implicit similes (i.e., this metaphor would be treated as if it were a comparison statement, "my job is like a jail"). Tversky's account of similarity is applied to such nonliteral similarity expressio ..."
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Cited by 133 (1 self)
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Traditionally, metaphors such as "my job is a jail " have been treated as implicit similes (i.e., this metaphor would be treated as if it were a comparison statement, "my job is like a jail"). Tversky's account of similarity is applied to such nonliteral similarity expressions, and is shown to apply as readily to nonliteral comparisons as to literal comparisons. But treating metaphors as comparison statements fails to account for certain important phenomena, including metaphoricity itself (the judgment that a comparison statement is nonliteral). We argue that metaphors are exactly what they appear to be: class-inclusion assertions, in which the topic of the metaphor (e.g., "my job") is as-signed to a diagnostic category (e.g., entities that confine one against one's will, are unpleasant, are difficult to escape from). In such assertions, the metaphor vehicle (e.g., "jail") refers to that category, and at the same time is a prototypical exemplar of that category. This account of metaphor provides a basis for a theory of metaphor comprehension, and also clarifies why people use metaphors instead of similes. How do people understand nonliteral expressions such as my grandfather is a baby? Taken literally, this sentence seems false. A grandfather must be an adult, and an adult cannot be of an
Understanding effects of proximity on collaboration: Implications for technologies to support remote collaborative work
- In P. Hinds & S. Kiesler (Eds.), Distributed work
, 2002
"... This chapter analyzes why computers and telecommunications have not created computcr-mediated work environments for collaboration that are as successful as physically shared environments. Our goals are, first, to identify the mechanisms by which proxin~ity makes cnl-laboration easier, concentrating ..."
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Cited by 115 (15 self)
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This chapter analyzes why computers and telecommunications have not created computcr-mediated work environments for collaboration that are as successful as physically shared environments. Our goals are, first, to identify the mechanisms by which proxin~ity makes cnl-laboration easier, concentrating on the way it facilitates interpersollal interaction and aware-ness; and second, to evaluate how current computer-mediated communication technologies provide or fail to provide the key benefits of proximity. We use a decompositional frame-work that examines how visibility, copresence, mobility, cotemporalitv and other affordances of media affect the important collaborative tasks of initiating conversation, establishing common ground, and maintaining awareness of potentially relevant changcs in the collabo-rative environment. Increasingly, collaborating with other people is as likely to take place over distance or time as it is face-to-face. An abundance of new communication technologies has been dcvcloped to mediate remote collaboration: e-mail, bulletin boards, instant messaging, document sharing, videoconferencing, awareness services, and others. Yet collaboration at a distance remains substantially harder to accomplish than
The ZPG Letter: Subjects, Definiteness, and Information-status
, 1988
"... this paper as well as the competence and interests of its author. Rather, I shall look at just one feature: how subjects differ from nonsubjects in the text. More specifically, I shall investigate the differences between subjects and nonsubjects with respect to one formal phenomenon, definiteness, a ..."
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Cited by 114 (7 self)
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this paper as well as the competence and interests of its author. Rather, I shall look at just one feature: how subjects differ from nonsubjects in the text. More specifically, I shall investigate the differences between subjects and nonsubjects with respect to one formal phenomenon, definiteness, and one discourse phenomenon, the information-status of the entities that the subjects and nonsubjects represent.
