Since at least the 50s when Austin told us how we do things with
words, it has been recognized that language performance can be
fruitfully viewed as action. There has subsequently been a range of
work reasoning about the action involved in the spoken language
communication process (speech acts), using both formal and empirical
methods. Views of communication as action have also been influential
in reasoning about machine communication in multiprocessor or
distributed systems. Moreover, many human-computer interactions have
also been described as actions similar to Austin and Searle's speech
acts. In recent years there has been an increased emphasis on theories
of action covering other aspects of the communication process,
including other modalities than speech and other aspects of dialogue
than the illocutionary acts associated with the utterance of
sentences. There has also been much subsequent work in philosophy,
logic, linguistics, and AI on the nature of actions, which can help
shed light on communicative action. We seek to bring together
researchers from a variety of perspectives on action in communication,
to discuss these issues, including the current state of the art and
assess prospects for synergy and future applications.
The symposium will focus on the following themes:
Theories of action and agency to support representing and reasoning
about communicative action.
Theories of communicative action including other modalities than
speech, and non-traditional levels of action.
Empirical investigation of communicative action.
Use of communicative action in applications.
Relations between the communicative action of differing types of
communicators (humans, machines, and mixtures of the two).
Relations between communicative action and other kinds of physical
and mental action (e.g., reasoning and learning).
