Call for Papers:

AAAI Fall 1997 Symposium on

Communicative Action in Humans and Machines

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

Contents

  • Submissions
  • Timetable

    • Introduction

    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:

    Submission Information

    Potential participants should submit each of the following:
    1. Name, physical and electronic addresses, also fax number and WWW URL if available. If several people working together (e.g. collaborating authors) wish to attend, each should submit separately, but should also name the others in the group.
    2. Bibliography entries to related papers (preferably in html and/or bibtex format), and links to URLs related to the theme of the symposium. These will be made publicly accessible via the symposium WWW page: http://www.cs.umd.edu/users/traum/CA/
    3. Either an extended abstract of a research paper to be presented at the symposium, or a brief statement describing why you wish to attend and how you believe that you can contribute to the symposium (describe your own related work and/or specific questions and issues that you feel should be addressed in the symposium). Abstracts should be no more than 10 pages (exclusive of references) in plain text or postscript files (12pt).
    Please send your submission via e-mail to traum@cs.umd.edu

    Contributions should address one or more of the following questions:

    1. Are existing AI theories of (physical) action adequate for representing and reasoning about communicative action?
    2. What kind of representation of the communicating agents (including "mental states" such as belief and intention) is necessary to model the conditions and effects of communicative actions?
    3. How can a particular theory of action be empirically tested for validity, utility, etc.? What methods (e.g., corpus-based, system building, empirical investigations) can help elicit deeper and broader models of communicative action?
    4. What are the compelling applications in which reasoning about communicative actions are a requirement (e.g., interfaces, communication analysis, network/agent management)?
    5. Is the "speech act" a useful intermediary concept (e.g., for representing intentions), or is a direct "context-change" model more appropriate to the tasks?
    6. Are speech act theories developed for human-human interaction adequate or appropriate for machine-machine or human-machine communication? If not, can they be felicitously adapted to serve as such?
    7. Can machine communication "simulations", communicating using explicit speech acts in their communication protocols, provide useful insights into the human communication process, in which speech act interpretation is also a necessary component?
    8. Are theories of speech acts well suited for analyzing other communication modalities, such as gestural communication in humans or graphical presentation in machine interfaces?
    9. What kinds of dialogue actions, other than sentence-level speech acts, occur in dialogue? How do these kinds of actions relate to traditional speech acts?
    10. What is the relationship between communicative actions and rhetorical relations, for example, in the context of generating multisentential and multimedia presentations (e.g., is there a "hierarchical" element of communication?).
    11. What is the relationship between dialogue acts and other kinds of actions affecting mental states, such as reasoning and learning?
    12. When language is only part of an interaction also involving non-linguistic domain action, what is the relationship between speech and other action, both for communication and task performance?

    Important Dates:

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

    Organizing Committee
    David Traum