{"type":"ScholarlyArticle","title":"Mutual Beliefs in Conversational Systems: Their Role in Referring Expressions","authors":[{"name":"Gopalan Nadathur","slug":"gopalan-nadathur","given":"Gopalan","family":"Nadathur","affiliation":""},{"name":"Aravind K. Joshi","slug":"aravind-k-joshi","given":"Aravind K.","family":"Joshi","affiliation":""}],"abstract":"Shared knowledge and beliefs affect conversational sit uations in various ways. One aspect in which they play a role is the choice of r e ferring expressions. It is of interest to analyse this role since a natural language system must be able to decide when it can use a particular referring expression; or al tern atively what a particular exp ression refers to. In this paper we attempt to formally c haracterise conditions for these. Specifically, we differ with the tradition al notion of mutual knowledge and helief, state a conversational conjecture that convinces us to do so, express a weakened notion in a formal system for reasoning about knowledge, and show how this mi gh t be used to decide on satisfactory referring expressions . It is desirable to express a weakened notion of mutual belief that parallels that for mutual knowledge; this aspect is currently being investigated.","doi":null,"url":"https://ijcai.org/proceedings/1983/141","pdf":"https://ijcai.org/proceedings/1983/0141.pdf","markdown":"https://ijcai.org/proceedings/1983/141.md","bibtex":"https://ijcai.org/proceedings/1983/bibtex/141","volume":{"slug":"1983","title":"Proceedings of the Eighth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence","short_title":"IJCAI 1983","url":"https://ijcai.org/proceedings/1983/","year":1983,"location":"Karlsruhe, West Germany","dates":"","editors":"Alan Bundy","isbn":"","publisher":"International Joint Conferences on Artificial Intelligence","doi_prefix":""},"section":"Natural Language","track":"Natural Language","number":141,"pages":{"first":603,"last":604},"keywords":[],"videos":[],"references":[],"license_note":"Copyright International Joint Conferences on Artificial Intelligence."}