Interaction Studies 17:1 (2016), 41–69. doi 10.1075/is.17.1.03mea issn 1572–0373 / e-issn 1572–0381 © John Benjamins Publishing Company Construals of meaning he role of attention in robotic language production Anne-Laure Mealier 1 , Grégoire Pointeau 1 , Peter Gärdenfors 2 and Peter Ford Dominey 1 1 INSERM SBRI U846, Human and Robot Cognitive Systems, France / 2 LUX, Lund University In robotics research with language-based interaction, simpliications are made, such that a given event can be described in a unique manner, where there is a direct mapping between event representations and sentences that can describe these events. However, common experience tells us that the same physical event can be described in multiple ways, depending on the perspective of the speaker. he current research develops methods for representing events from multiple perspectives, and for choosing the perspective that will be used for generating a linguistic construal, based on attentional processes in the system. he multiple perspectives are based on the principle that events can be considered in terms of the force driving the event, and the result obtained from the event, based on the theory of Gärdenfors. In addition, within these perspectives a further reinement can be made with respect to the agent, object, and recipient perspectives. We develop a system for generating appropriate construals of meaning, and demon- strate how this can be used in a realistic dialogic interaction between a behaving robot and a human interlocutor. 1. Introduction In certain applications of robot language systems, there is a direct mapping be- tween language and meaning, e.g. (Lauria et al 2002). For example, if a human wants to ask the robot to perform a very speciic action, then it is desirable that there is no ambiguity (Lallée et al 2010). he simplicity of this direct mapping breaks down almost immediately when language is used to inform and not only to request. he basic problem is that, when describing events language allows one to focus on any one of a multitude of speciic aspects of an event (Dominey & Boucher 2005a, Dominey & Boucher 2005b). Given a particular perspective of