As multi-turn dialogues with large language models (LLMs) grow longer and more complex, how can users better evaluate and review progress on their conversational goals? We present OnGoal, an LLM chat interface that helps users better manage goal progress. OnGoal provides real-time feedback on goal alignment through LLM-assisted evaluation, explanations for evaluation results with examples, and overviews of goal progression over time, enabling users to navigate complex dialogues more effectively. Through a study with 20 participants on a writing task, we evaluate OnGoal against a baseline chat interface without goal tracking. Using OnGoal, participants spent less time and effort to achieve their goals while exploring new prompting strategies to overcome miscommunication, suggesting tracking and visualizing goals can enhance engagement and resilience in LLM dialogues. Our findings inspired design implications for future LLM chat interfaces that improve goal communication, reduce cognitive load, enhance interactivity, and enable feedback to improve LLM performance.

Cooperative speech is purposive. From the speaker's perspective, one crucial purpose is the transmission of knowledge. Cooperative speakers care about getting things right for their conversational partners. This attitude is a kind of respect. Cooperative speech is an ideal form of communication because participants have respect for each other. And having respect within a cooperative enterprise is sufficient for a particular kind of moral standing: we ought to respect those who have respect for us. Respect demands reciprocity. I maintain that large language models aren't owed the kind of respect that partly constitutes a cooperative conversation. This implies that they aren't cooperative interlocutors, otherwise we would be obliged to reciprocate the attitude. Leveraging this conclusion, I argue that present-day LLMs are incapable of assertion and that this raises an overlooked doubt about their semantic competence. One upshot of this argument is that knowledge of meaning isn't just a subject for the cognitive psychologist. It's also a subject for the moral psychologist.

Could we enrich speech-act theory to deal with discourse? Wittgenstein and Searle are sceptical. In my view, the primary aim of discourse pragmatics is to analyze the structure and dynamics of language-games with an internal conversational goal. Logic can analyze felicity-conditions of such collective illocutions. For interlocutors obey systems of constitutive rules in conducting descriptive, deliberative, declaratory or expressive dialogues. I will show how to construct speaker-meaning from sentence-meaning, conversational background and maxims. I will also explain how to use the resources of formalisms and mathematical logic and to further develop intensional and illocutionary logics, the logic of attitudes and of action in order to characterize our ability to converse. I will also deal with the nature of intelligent dialogues between man and machines in A.I.