Abductive understanding of dialogues about joint activities:

Langley, Pat; Meadows, Ben; Gabaldon, Alfredo; Heald, Richard

doi:10.1075/is.15.3.04lan

Article published in:

Mental Model Ascription by Intelligent Agents
Edited by Marjorie McShane
[Interaction Studies 15:3] 2014
► pp. 426–454

Abductive understanding of dialogues about joint activities

Pat Langley | Carnegie Mellon University/University of Auckland

Ben Meadows | University of Auckland

Alfredo Gabaldon | Carnegie Mellon University

Richard Heald | University of Auckland

This paper examines the task of understanding dialogues in terms of the mental states of the participating agents. We present a motivating example that clarifies the challenges this problem involves and then outline a theory of dialogue interpretation based on abductive inference of these unobserved beliefs and goals, incremental construction of explanations, and reliance on domain-independent knowledge. After this, we describe UMBRA, an implementation of the theory that embodies these assumptions. We report experiments with the system that demonstrate its ability to accurately infer the conversants’ mental states even when some speech acts are unavailable. We conclude by reviewing related research on dialogue and discussing avenues for future study.

Keywords: mind-reading, mental state ascription, abductive inference, dialogue understanding

Published online: 06 February 2015
https://doi.org/10.1075/is.15.3.04lan

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