common ground

Terms from Artificial Intelligence: humans at the heart of algorithms

Common ground is a term, coined by Herbert (Herb) Clark and colleagues, used in the theory of cooperative communications. It refers to the way that two or more people establish a level of shared understanding sufficient for theor purposes as a side effect of communicating to acheive theor goals. They typically do not try to have complete shared knowledge of everything, nor even spend lots of time at the beginning establishing shared language, but instead build this through unconscious but skillful use of language includuing redundancy and repair. This can be used as a model for human-AI interactions and inter-agent communications.

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