In this paper, we present a dynamic semantics for dialogue in terms of commitments. We use this to provide a model theoretic treatment of ambiguity and its effects on the evolutions of commitments as a dialogue proceeds. Our first semantics ensures common commitments and has a simple logic for which we provide a complete axiomatization. On the other hand, our semantics poses difficulties for th...

Restoring forest landscapes is critical in the face of continued global forest loss and degradation. In this article, we explore some challenges underlying the delivery of global commitments to restore forest landscapes. We propose that three fundamental questions need to be resolved upfront for the effective implementation of Forest Landscape Restoration and related commitments: (1) What socia...

A ‘new Kyoto’, called for by the Australian government, may well be based on cap-and-trade, but with significant changes. Under the old Kyoto, broad participation and meaningful commitments were difficult to achieve – in part because of uncertainty about compliance costs and the dichotomy between countries with targets and those without. This policy brief examines options for making greenhouse ...

We propose a method for reactive mission planning in dynamic environments that also allows for appropriate commitments to future actions and goals. We consider appropriate commitments to be those based on predictable features of the situation and environment that are unlikely to change. By organizing other actions based on these commitments, we hope to create a planner that is able not only to ...

Preferential trade agreements (PTAs) on services have proliferated since 2000. This working paper briefly presents the expansion of the dataset initially developed in Marchetti and Roy (2008). The data permits to assess the extent to which market access commitments undertaken by WTO Members in PTAs go beyond GATS commitments and offers made in the context of the Doha Development Agenda. The dat...

How should an organization choose policies to strengthen its relationships with employees and partners? We explore how biased policies arise in relational contracts using a flexible dynamic game between a principal and several agents with unrestricted vertical transfers and symmetric information. If relationships are publicly observed, then optimal policies are never biased– they are always cho...

Considering the appeal of different magical transformations exposes some systematic asymmetries. For example, it is more interesting to transform a vase into a rose than a rose into a vase. An experiment in which people judged how interesting they found different magic tricks showed that these asymmetries reflect the direction a transformation moves in an ontological hierarchy: transformations ...

We propose a method for modelling how dialogue moves influence and are influenced by the agents’ preferences. We extract constraints on preferences and dependencies among them, even when they are expressed indirectly, by exploiting discourse structure. Our method relies on a study of 20 dialogues chosen at random from the Verbmobil corpus. We then test the algorithms predictions against the jud...

This paper is partly inspired by a well-known debate between Ruth Barean Marcus, Terence Parsons and W. V. O. Quine in the sixties) coneerning the extent to whieh Quantified Modal Logie ('QMr: heneeforth) is committed to Hessentialism"; the issue nevertheless goes back to the origins of "analytic philosophy': to the reflections of Frege, Russell, and the eadier Wittgenstein on the nature of log...

According to alcohol-myopia theory (C. M. Steele & R. A. Josephs, 1990), alcohol leads individuals to disproportionally focus on the most salient aspects of a situation and to ignore peripheral information. The authors hypothesized that alcohol leads individuals to strongly commit to their goals without considering information about the probability of goal attainment. In Study 1, participants n...