Confirmations and Joint Action

Philip R. Cohen, Hector J. Levesque

Abstract: We argue that current plan-based theories of discourse do not by themselves explain prevalent phenomena in even simple task-oriented dialogues. The purpose of this paper is to show how one difhcult-to-explain feature of these dialogues, confirmations, follows from the joint or team nature of the underlying task. Specifically, we review the concept of a joint intention and we argue that the conversants in a task-oriented dialogue jointly intend to accomplish the task. From this basis, we derive the goals underlying the pervasive use of confirmations observed in a recent experiment. We conclude with a discussion on generalizing the analysis presented here to characterize dialogue itself as a joint activity.