Context Shifts And Clashes In Dialogues: An Active Logic Perspective

  • Authors:

  • Michael Miller

  • Affiliations:

  • Department of Computer Science, University of Maryland, College Park, MD 20742, USA, (301) 405-7584, mm@cs.umd.edu

  • Venue:
  • Fundamenta Informaticae
  • Year:
  • 1995

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Abstract

Context plays a crucial role in natural-language dialogues. But context can change over the course of a dialogue, and thus communicating agents are tasked with identifying and keeping track of context shifts in order to understand conversations. But context is not wholly objective; each participant in a dialogue has her own view of context. At times the parties involved in a dialogue will unknowingly presume different (aspects of) contexts from one another, perhaps because one person has not kept up with the other's most recent context shift. The resulting context clash may lead to confusion or miscommunication. Agents must be prepared to sort out these confusions when they become evident. Active logics can be successfully utilized by an agent facing confusions such as those that arise when a context clash leads her to misidentify an object. In this paper the active logic approach to resolving such effects of a context clash is sketched. The agent's misidentification is initially reflected in her beliefs, and belief revision is later used to resolve this effect of the clash. As theoretical tools active logics have proven useful for solving a varied array of commonsense reasoning problems, but with implementation comes space and time complexity concerns. These are also discussed along with a proposed partial remedy based in part on context or focus-of-attention.