Strategic Conversation (STAC)
Strategic Conversation (STAC) is funded by the European Research Council (ERC), 2011--2016. The PI is Nicholas Asher (Toulouse), and the partners are Toulouse, Edinburgh (for whom I'm site leader) and Heriot Watt.
The aim of this project is to model conversation in scenarios where the agents goals conflict. In such scenarios, the maxims of cooperativity and sincerity that normally form the bedrock for computing discourse interpretation don't necessarily apply. We are therefore modelling implicature by other means, integrating an existing model of discourse coherence (see SDRT) and its interaction with semantics to models of human action decision making from game theory and behavioural economics. From a theoretical perspective, this involves extending and refining SDRT with a model of human reasoning involving solution concepts from game theory. We use this extended framework to predict when it's safe to treat an implicature as a matter of public record, for instance.
From a practical perspective, we have collected and analysed a dialogue corpus of agents playing Settlers of Catan: a zero-sum game where players negotiate and trade over restricted resources. This is arguably the first data collection effort for non-cooperative conversations where each utterance is temporally aligned with its game state, in machine readable form. We use this corpus to develop a symbolic model of a dialogue agent that plays Settlers, and we intend to use machine learning techniques to adapt that agent to handle unseen game states. My main collaborators on this project are Nicholas Asher, Markus Guhe, Oliver Lemon and Verena Rieser.