MoL-2001-03: Nilsenová, Marie (2001) Uncertainty in the Common Ground. [Report]
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Abstract
This thesis is about the uncertainties that naturally form a part of
human communication. Language as a communication medium is inherently
ambiguous. It is generally assumed that its use is made possible by
the existence of common ground among communicating participants, but
the question of how common ground comes about is usually left
aside. Descriptions of natural conversations suggest that in view of
the noisiness of the channel, agents constantly employ means to ensure
that changes in the mutual context took place, i.e., they attend to a
"dialogue about the dialogue". A particular set of communicative acts
used on this level is called grounding. Certain grounding acts pose
difficulties to existing formalizations of rational communicative
behavior, because they come out as improper or irrelevant. This is an
undesirable effect considering the fact that they belong to the most
commonly performed dialogue acts. To solve the difficulty, we propose
an extension of two recent decision-theoretic approaches to
communication. We take it that communicating agents base their actions
on probabilistic beliefs about what forms the set of mutually believed
propositions. During the interpretation process, the relevance of each
utterance is evaluated against the interpreter's epistemic state,
represented in a Bayesian model. Subsequent belief changes can ensue,
serving as the basis for planning further communicative actions. The
analysis can account for the relevance of different types of
acknowledging acts, and potentially for other problematic phenomena on
the semantic-pragmatic interface.
| Item Type: | Report |
|---|---|
| Report Nr: | MoL-2001-03 |
| Series Name: | Master of Logic Thesis (MoL) Series |
| Year: | 2001 |
| Date Deposited: | 12 Oct 2016 14:38 |
| Last Modified: | 12 Oct 2016 14:38 |
| URI: | https://eprints.illc.uva.nl/id/eprint/716 |
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