Page 247 - Socially Intelligent Agents Creating Relationships with Computers and Robots

230 Socially Intelligent Agents

more conventional conversational settings. Further, by building systems that
are sensitive to the nature of this co-operative contract, it’s the goal of our re-
search to enable the creation of interactive narratives that are more engaging as
well as more compelling than current state-of-the-art interactive entertainment.

2. Cooperative Discourse Across Genre and Across Media
H. P. Grice, the philosopher of language, characterized conversation as a
co-operative process [3] and described a number of general rules, called the
Maxims of Conversation, that a co-operative speaker follows. According to
Grice, speakers select what they say in obedience to these rules, and hearers
draw inferences about the speaker’s meaning based on the assumption that these
rules guide speakers’ communication. Grice’s Co-operative Principle states:
“Make your conversational contribution such as is required, at the stage at
which it occurs, by the accepted purpose or direction of the talk exchange in
which you are engaged.”
From this very general principle follow four maxims of conversation:

The Maxim of Quantity: Make your contribution as informative as
required but no more so.

The Maxim of Quality: Try to make your contribution one that is
true.

The Maxim of Relation: Be relevant.

The Maxim of Manner: Be perspicuous.

The Co-operative Principle and its maxims license a wide range of inferences
in conversation that are not explicitly warranted by the things that we say.
Consider the following exchange:
Bob: How many kids do you have?
Frank: I’ve got two boys.

In this exchange, Bob relies upon the Maxim of Quantity to infer that Frank
has only two children, even though Frank did not say that he had two and only
two boys and, furthermore, no girls. For Frank to respond as he does should he
have two boys and two girls at home would be uncooperative in a Gricean sense
precisely because it violates our notions of what can be inferred from what is
left unsaid.
This is just one example of how meaning can be conveyed without being
explicitlystated, simplybasedonan assumption of co-operativity. Thisreliance
upon co-operation is also observable in contexts other than person-to-person
communication. For instance, the comprehension of narrative prose fiction