AAAI Fall 1997 Symposium on

Communicative Action in Humans and Machines

November 8-10th, 1997, MIT, Cambridge, MA, USA


Links:


Overview

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:


Important Dates (1997):

April 15 Deadline for submission of papers
May 15 Notification of acceptance
August 22nd Papers due for the working notes
November 8-10 Symposium

Administrative Links


Organizing Committee


David Traum