Sociology’s marginality to public discussion of the crisis stems partly from naïveté about the sociology of its own knowledge, in particular about its interlocutors’ interests. Historically, sociology has repeatedly re-established its intellectual relevance through its dialogue with movements for social change; this article argues that another such dialogue is overdue. Starting from existing di...

In this paper we present an approach to dialogue management that supports the generation of multifunctional utterances. It is based on the multidimensional dialogue act taxonomy and associated context model as developed in Dynamic Interpretation Theory (DIT). The multidimensional organisation of the taxonomy reflects that there are various aspects that dialogue participants have to deal with si...

Until recently, the goal of developing opendomain dialogue systems that not only emulate human conversation but fulfill complex tasks, such as travel planning, seemed elusive. However, we start to observe promising results in the last few years as the large amount of conversation data is available for training and the breakthroughs in deep learning and reinforcement learning are applied to dial...

Abstract Hume begins his Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion by discussing what an ideal dialogue ought to look like. Many considerations that raises coincide with similar concerns in contemporary social epistemology. This paper examines three aspects of Hume's epistemology: epistemic peerhood, inquiry norms and the possibility rational persuasion. Interestingly, however, I will argue convers...

In order to build dialogue systems to tackle the ambitious task of holding social conversations, we argue that we need a data-driven approach that includes insight into human conversational “chit-chat”, and which incorporates different natural language processing modules. Our strategy is to analyze and index large corpora of social media data, including Twitter conversations, online debates, di...