ICT FML Workshop May 7-9 2010

Burning Issues

• Relationship of FML and BML: division of labour - what goes where, e.g. role of linguistic syntax
• Agent vs System point of view: should FML/BML be for a single autonomous agent or for groups of agents working as part of a unified presentation system?
• How to express unintentional funcion - e.g. unsuccesful deception
• Breaking/opening up the SAIBA pipeline
• Stefan:
  • Clearly confine what FML is mainly for (<- important to take a practical stance here)
    • spec of everything that needs to be realized by behaviors in order to achieve some higher-level goal?
    • spec of everything that might possibly causal of overt behavior (e.g. cognitive operations)?
    • context variables: part of FML?
    • goal/intention hierarchy - define where FML has to pick up from (e.g. include full-blown Gricean communicative intentions?)
    • required to make everything explicit (e.g. implicit speech acts)?
  • Structural issues (<- this is in my view one of the most important first steps we should tackle now)
    • what is the basic layout of fundamental structures: units, operations, dimensions, other parameters?
    • what dimensions are to be involved? how can they be combined (e.g. emotion and speech acts)? how can each of them be organized within sub-spaces (e.g. taxonomy of speech acts)?
    • granularity
    • compositionality and (in-)dependencies
    • preferences and conflict resolution rules
  • Possible starting points
    • pro's and con's of taking things like DIT++, which provide a lot of insight but were not really meant for the same thing (e.g. annotation system vs. generation specification language)
    • working towards FML bottom-up from behavior planning issues (i.e. what needs a Behavior Planner?) or top-down from content and action planning issues?
    • adopting info-state update approach for FML? do we need an underlying concept of a dialogue model in relation to which FML is to work?
• Paul
  • How is incrementality dealt with?
  • How to balance generality and representation of domain-specific information?
  • How is contextual information dealt with?
  • Do we need to make a clear distinction between reactive and planned behaviours?
  • Do we need to take into account multilinguality and also accessibility issues?
  • How does FML fit in with language generation architectures (such as Reiter & Dale and RAGS) and language production architectures (e.g., Levelt and De Ruiter)?
  • To what extent does FML allow for representation of non-communicative behaviours.

Possible FML Elements

• Dialogue Acts
• Information Structure
• Emotion
• Dishonesty/deception
• explicitness/importance of information (implications for whether one should be subtle or overt, implicated or explicit, complementary or redundant in expressing the function)
• interpersonal relationship management (status, dominance/submission, closeness/distance)
• culture-specific factors & personality differences  (is this a function itself or a method of realizing function in behavior, or some of each)
• behavior-level function (e.g. to nod head, regardless of what this means)
• Environmental effects (i.e. monitoring status of objects/characters, capture of attention) Conversational regulation (i.e. nonverbal backchannel feedback)

Other Issues