Modeling Ambiguity in a Multi-Agent System

Appeared in: P. Dekker (Ed.) Proceedings of the 12th Amsterdam Colloquium (AC’99). Institute for Logic, Language and Computation, 1999, pages 43–48. This paper investigates the formal pragmatics of ambiguous expressions by modeling ambiguity in a multi-agent system. Such a framework allows us to give a more refined notion of the kind of information that is conveyed by ambiguous expressions. We analyze how ambiguity affects the knowledge of the dialog participants and, especially, what they know about each other after an ambiguous sentence has been uttered. The agents communicate with each other by means of a tell-function, whose application is constrained by an implementation of some of Grice’s maxims. The information states of the multi-agent system itself are represented as a Kripke structures and tell is an update function on those structures. This framework enables us to distinguish between the information conveyed by ambiguous sentences vs. the information conveyed by disjunctions, and between semantic ambiguity vs. perceived ambiguity.