Communicative Action in Humans and Machines

This symposium reexamined the view (proposed by Austin and developed by Searle and others) of communication as action rather than transmission of information. Such a view has become popular as a characterization of language use, and it plays a central role in the dialogue-management components of many systems that communicate with human users or other agents. An abstract level of representation such as speech acts is also useful as a media-independent characterization of the function of communication. Current work that was presented and discussed at the symposium included both extensions to classical speech-act theory as well as attempts at standardization of speech-act labels. The extensions included accounts of dialogue phenomena other than classical illocutionary acts, such as turn taking, feedback, problem solving, and persuasion as well as the importance of social phenomena such as rights, roles, and obligations.