The process of adding to the common ground between conversational participants (called
grounding) has previously been either oversimplified or studied in an off-line manner. This …

Human agents draw a variety of inferences effortlessly, spontaneously, and with remarkable
efficiency–as though these inferences were a reflexive response of their cognitive …

This thesis is an inquiry into the nature of the high-level, rhetorical structure of unrestricted
natural language texts, computational means to enable its derivation, and two applications …

We show that in modeling social interaction, particularly dialogue, the attitude of obligation
can be a useful adjunct to the popularly considered attitudes of belief, goal, and intention …

Participants in a discourse sometimes fail to understand one another, but, when aware of the
problem, collaborate upon or negotiate the meaning of a problematic utterance. To address …

A dialogue agent is one that can interact and communicate with other agents, in a coherent
manner, not just with one-shot messages, but with a sequence of related messages all on …

Here we describe an abductive account of the interpretation of speech acts and the repair of
speech act misunderstandings. Our discussion considers the kinds o fin formation that …

We argue that meta-dialog and meta-reasoning, far from being of only occasional use, are
the very essence of conversation and communication between agents. We give four …

To respond to an utterance, a listener must interpret what others have said and why they
have said it. Misunderstandings occur when agents differ in their beliefs about what has …

Human agents draw a variety of inferences effortlessly, spontaneously, and with remarkable
efficiency-as though these inferences were a reflexive response of their cognitive apparatus …