Mutual Beliefs in Conversational Systems: Their Role in Referring Expressions
Abstract
Shared knowledge and beliefs affect conversational situations in various ways. One aspect in which they play a role is the choice of referring expressions. It is of interest to analyse this role since a natural language system must be able to decide when it can use a particular referring expression; or alternatively what a particular expression refers to. In this paper we attempt to formally characterise conditions for these. Specifically, we differ with the traditional notion of mutual knowledge and belief, state a conversational conjecture that convinces us to do so, express a weakened notion in a formal system for reasoning about knowledge, and show how this might be used to decide on satisfactory referring expressions. It is desirable to express a weakened notion of mutual belief that parallels that for mutual knowledge; this aspect is currently being investigated.
Cite
Text
Nadathur and Joshi. "Mutual Beliefs in Conversational Systems: Their Role in Referring Expressions." International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, 1983.Markdown
[Nadathur and Joshi. "Mutual Beliefs in Conversational Systems: Their Role in Referring Expressions." International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, 1983.](https://mlanthology.org/ijcai/1983/nadathur1983ijcai-mutual/)BibTeX
@inproceedings{nadathur1983ijcai-mutual,
title = {{Mutual Beliefs in Conversational Systems: Their Role in Referring Expressions}},
author = {Nadathur, Gopalan and Joshi, Aravind K.},
booktitle = {International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence},
year = {1983},
pages = {603-605},
url = {https://mlanthology.org/ijcai/1983/nadathur1983ijcai-mutual/}
}