Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Stories concerning multiple agents with interacting goals and plans are difficult to understand;the task can be simplified however, if a program is given sufficient knowledge of social structures. Representations of social aspects of the story may also be necessary components of a satisfactory understanding of the story; here, we consider the distinctions which must be representable to support the task of advice-giving in the social-domain.This paper elaborates on established goal taxonomies in order to capture distinctions among goals embedded in a social context;these distinctions serve both as the basis for choosing advice and as inferential shortcuts.It goes on to explore ways in which such social goals can be predicted from a detailed understanding of the conventions defining social structures linking the various agents. Social units,social-situations, and triangles are introduced as conceptual structures which organize interpersonal-themes. The goals predicted by these themes provide a focus for motivational and impact inferences which would otherwise be lacking. These and related structures also allow some direct predictions of actions, as when a social-situation provides scriptal specification of action sequences or when a contract underlying a social-unit licenses specific recourses in response to obligation failures.