Strategic conversation
By Nicholas Asher. 2012
Models of conversation that rely on a strong notion of cooperation don’t apply to strategic conversation — that is, to conversation where the agents’ motives don’t align, such as courtroom cross examination and political debate. We provide a game-theoretic framework that provides an analysis of both cooperative and strategic conversation. Our analysis features a new notion of safety that applies to implicatures: an implicature is safe when it can be reliably treated as a matter of public record. We explore the safety of implicatures within cooperative and non cooperative settings. We then provide a symbolic model enabling us (i) to prove a correspondence result between a characterisation of conversation in terms of an alignment of players’ preferences and one where Gricean principles of cooperative conversation like Sincerity hold, and (ii) to show when an implicature is safe and when it
Subfields: Dialogue & Conversational AI
How researchers see this paper
The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.
In Dialogue & Conversational AI
Citations in the corpus
- Neural Theory-of-Mind? On the Limits of Social Intelligence in Large LMs (2022, background): “, 2019), reasoning about public commitments (Asher and Lascarides, 2013), predicting”
- Cancelling the Maxim of Quantity: Another challenge for a Gricean theory of Scalar Implicatures (2014, background): “2 As pointed out to me by David Beaver, recent work by Asher (2012) and Asher & Lascarides (2013) makes a similar argument.”