Speech Act Theory as an Evaluation Tool for Human–Agent Communication

Nader Hanna,Deborah Richards

doi:10.3390/a12040079

Abstract

Effective communication in task-oriented situations requires high-level interactions. For human–agent collaboration, tasks need to be coordinated in a way that ensures mutual understanding. Speech Act Theory (SAT) aims to understand how utterances can be used to achieve actions. SAT consists of three components: locutionary act, illocutionary act, and perlocutionary act. This paper evaluates the agent’s verbal communication while collaborating with humans. SAT was used to anatomize the structure of the agent’s speech acts (locutionary acts), the agent’s intention behind the speech acts (illocutionary acts), and the effects on the human’s mental state (perlocutionary acts). Moreover, this paper studies the impact of human perceptions of the agent’s speech acts on the perception of collaborative performance with the agent.

Highlights

This paper aims to study the plausibility of using Speech Act Theory (SAT) concepts to analyse the verbal communication between a human and an agent in a collaborative virtual environment
SAT was used as a tool to evaluate the effectiveness of the verbal communication in conveying the agent’s intentions
This study aimed to present SAT concepts as applicable tools to evaluate an agent’s verbal communication

Summary

Introduction

Human–agent communication in a collaborative virtual environment (VE), where both the human and the agent should collaborate together to complete a shared goal, is a challenging task as the communication should be real-time, goal-driven, and the verbal and non-verbal communication should be interleaved in order to achieve the common goal [1]. Most natural communication situations require integrating communication channels [2]. Agent-to-agent communication tends to be manageable especially if the agents involved in communication are designed around Beliefs, Desires, and Intentions (BDI). Many researchers aim to design systems and models that involve human–agent communication. Some of these works focus only on verbal communication. Luin, Akker [12] present a natural language accessible navigation agent for a virtual theatre environment where the user can navigate into the environment and the agents inside the system can answer the user’s questions

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Discussion

Conclusion