Efficiency Tradeoffs for Language and Action in Collaborative Tasks
Marilyn A. Walker · 1995
The view that communication is a type of ac-tion has provided a basis for research in natu-ral language processing for many years. How-ever, models of task-oriented dialogic interac-tion fail to fully exploit the language-as-action perspective because there is no deep under-standing of the interaction between the defi-nition of the task, the autonomy of the agents doing the task, and efficient language behav-ior. In this paper, I examine the interaction of three factors:(1) agents ’ autonomy; (2) agents’ resource bounds; and (3) the distribution task-relevant information. I motivate a num-ber of hypotheses with examples from naturally occurring task-oriented dialogues where agents’ autonomy varies. Then I show that dialogue performance of two autonomous agents is bet-ter than the dialogue performance of one au-tonomous and one non-autonomous agent, in-dependent of the information distribution, as long as the agents are resource bounded. 1