Toward a Cognitive Approach to Human-Robot Dialogue (original) (raw)

A theory of language sufficient for building conversationally-adequate human-robot dialogue systems must account for the communicative act as a whole, from the inferential mechanism of intersubjective joint attention-sharing up through the conceptualization processes that respond to those inferences. However, practitioners of AI have in the past tended to adopt linguistic theories that either emphasize or tacitly assume the modularity of linguistic mental processes that is, their isolation from the pressures and influences of other cognitive processes. These assumptions have precluded satisfactory mod-eling of human language use. An adequate theory of language will account naturally and holistically (without ad hoc computational machinery) for discourse structure, referential flexibility, lexical non-compositionality, deixis, pragmatic effects , gesture, and intonation. This paper makes the argument that certain theories in the field of cognitive linguistics already exhibit these desiderata, and briefly describes work to implement one.