Elementary Contracts as a Pragmatic Basis of Language Interaction

ABSTRACT Language interaction (LI) as a part of inter- personal communication is considerably influenced by psychological and social roles nf the partners and their pragmatic goals. These aspects of communica- tion should be accounted for while elaborating advanced user-computer dialogue systems and develop- ing formal models of LI. We propose here a formal description of communicative context of Li-situa- tion, namely, a system of indices of LI agents' interest in achieving various pragmatic purposes and a system of contracts which reflect social and psychological roles of the LI agents and conventio- nalize their "rights" and "duties" in tlle LI- process. Different values of these parameters of communication allow us to state possibility or/and necessity of certain types of speech acts under certain conditious of LI-situation. 1. INTRODUCTION ELEMENTARY CONTRACTS AS A PRAGMATIC BASIS OF LANGUAGE INTERACTION E.L. Pershina A[ Laboratory, Computer Center Siberian Division of the USSR Ae. Sei. Novosibirsk 630090, USSR goals. The value t of this threshold is indivldual for each agent in different communicative situation. The values of these indices are generated under the influence of different psychological, ethical, pragmatical and other factors. The degree of importance of each factor is determined by individual characteristics of each agent and may vary during the LI-process. Hence the values of relevancy indices may also vary. We consider interpersonal communication as joint activity of LI agents (X and Y). Each agent has his own plan of behaviour which is represented here by a system of goals (G.X or G.V), i.e.certain pragmatic and communicative tasks to be realized. The system of goals of the agent, for instance,G.X, may contain both the goals initiated by X himself and the goals initiated by his partner Y. Formation of the system of goals by the agent X is associated with the twu following communicative metagoais: -kl is an inclusion of a goal g into the partner's system of goals G.Y; --k2 is an inclusion of a goal g into X's own system of goals G.X. Language interaction is considered as a process aimed at accomplishing one of these metagoals. Each agent chooses a mode of achieving metagoals iu response to socially determined relations between him and his partner. These relations are described by a system of contracts ([1],[2],[3]). In this paper we propose a formal description of some elementary contracts formed by combination of basic relations between the partners. 2. THE SYSTEM OF RELEVANCY INDICES. In order to describe agents' positions with respect to a potential goal g we introduce three indices being individual for each agent: -INT(X,g) is a degree of X's interest (necessity, desirability) in achieving tile goal g; this index may be either positive or negative; -CST(X,g) is a cost of achieving tile goal g, i.e. the efforts to be made by X for achieving g; this index is always positive; -BEN(X,g) is a benefit which may be derived by X from achieving g; BEN(X,g)=INT(X,g)-CST(X,g). We consider some threshold t which,in general case, shouhl be exceeded by BEN(X,g) (BEN(X,g}>t) for including …

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