This volume presents important results of the Collaborative Research Center (Sonderforschungsbereich) "Situated Artificial Communicators," which was funded by grants from the German Research Foundation (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft) for more than twelve years.

The contributions focus on different aspects of human-human and human-machine interaction in situations which closely model everyday workplace demands. The authors are linguists, psycho- und neurolinguists, psychologists and computer scientists at Bielefeld University. They jointly tackle questions of information processing in task-oriented communication. The role of key notions such as context, integration (of multimodal information), reference, coherence, and robustness is explored in great depth.

Some remarkable findings and recurrent phenomena reveal that communication is, to a large extent, a matter of joint activity. The interdisciplinary approach integrates theory, description and experimentation with simulation and evaluation.

EDITORS

Gert Rickheit is Professor of Linguistics and Psycholinguistics at the Universität Bielefeld, Germany. Ipke Wachsmuth is Director of the Center for Interdisciplinary Research (ZiF) and Chair of Artificial Intelligence at the Universität Bielefeld, Germany.

Introduction Gert Rickheit, Ipke Wachsmuth

The constitution of meaning in situated communication Gert Rickheit

Processing instructions Petra Weiß, Thies Pfeiffer, Hans-Jürgen Eikmeyer, Gert Rickheit

Visually grounded language processing in object reference Constanze Vorwerg, Sven Wachsmuth, Gudrun Socher

Psycholinguistic experiments on spatial relations using stereoscopic presentation Helmut Flitter, Thies Pfeiffer, Gert Rickheit

Deictic object reference in task-oriented dialogue Alfred Kranstedt, Andy Lücking, Thies Pfeiffer, Hannes Rieser, Ipke Wachsmuth Computational models of visual tagging Marc Pomplun, Elena Carbone, Hendrik Koesling, Lorenz Sichelschmidt, Helge Ritter

Neurobiological aspects of meaning constitution during language processing Horst M. Müller

Neuroinformatic techniques in cognitive neuroscience of language Matthias Kaper, Peter Meinicke, Horst M. Müller, Sabine Weiss, Holger Bekel, Thomas Herrmann, Axel Saalbach, Helge Ritter

Situated interaction with a virtual human – perception, action, and cognition Nadine Leßmann, Stefan Kopp, Ipke Wachsmuth

Integrated perception for cooperative human-machine interaction Christian Bauckhage, Gernot A. Fink, Jannik Fritsch, Nils Jungclaus, Susanne Kronenberg, Franz Kummert, Frank Lömker, Gerhard Sagerer, Sven Wachsmuth

Architectures of situated communicators: From perception to cognition to learning Gernot A. Fink, Jannik Fritsch, Nadine Leßmann, Helge Ritter, Gerhard Sagerer, Jochen J. Steil, Ipke Wachsmuth

A systems framework of communicative understanding Hans-Jürgen Eikmeyer, Walther Kindt, Yvonne Rittgeroth, Hans Strohner

System theoretical modeling on situated communication Hans-Jürgen Eikmeyer, Walther Kindt, Hans Strohner