---
title: "Confirmations and Joint Action"
authors:
  - "Philip R. Cohen"
  - "Hector J. Levesque"
doi: ""
url: "https://ijcai.org/proceedings/1991/140"
pdf: "https://ijcai.org/proceedings/1991/0140.pdf"
venue: "Proceedings of the Twelfth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence"
year: 1991
pages: "951-958"
track: "Natural Language"
keywords:
---

# Confirmations and Joint Action

Philip R. Cohen, Hector J. Levesque

*Proceedings of the Twelfth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence*, pages 951-958.

## Abstract

We argue that current plan-based theories of discourse do not by themselves explain prevalent phenomena in even simple task-oriented dialogues. The purpose of this paper is to show how one difficult-to-explain feature of these dialogues, confirmations, follows from the joint or team nature of the underlying task. Specifically, we review the concept of a joint intention and we argue that the conversants in a task-oriented dialogue jointly intend to accomplish the task. From this basis, we derive the goals underlying the pervasive use of confirmations observed in a recent experiment. We conclude with a discussion on generalizing the analysis presented here to characterize dialogue itself as a joint activity.