---
title: "Mutual Beliefs in Conversational Systems: Their Role in Referring Expressions"
authors:
  - "Gopalan Nadathur"
  - "Aravind K. Joshi"
doi: ""
url: "https://ijcai.org/proceedings/1983/141"
pdf: "https://ijcai.org/proceedings/1983/0141.pdf"
venue: "Proceedings of the Eighth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence"
year: 1983
pages: "603-604"
track: "Natural Language"
keywords:
---

# Mutual Beliefs in Conversational Systems: Their Role in Referring Expressions

Gopalan Nadathur, Aravind K. Joshi

*Proceedings of the Eighth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence*, pages 603-604.

## 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.