28 March 2001, Wednesday, 2 pm - 3 pm+ in Seminar Room 1F259
We examine the notions of meaning and information for animals or agents engaged in interaction games, and the organisation of communicative abilities in populations sharing an environment. Concepts from cognitive ethology, linguistics, semiotics, and evolution are surveyed. Innateness, individual learning, and social aspects (social learning and cultural transmission) in the evolution of communication are reviewed with particular attention to what classes of linguistic abilities have been and have not been demonstrated, including self-organisation of vocabularies, categorisation, deixis, predication, negation, compositional structure, and recursive syntax (-- these concepts will be introduced and illustrated in the talk).
Studies on animals and agents showing degrees of communication are reviewed and analysed with an eye to describing what aspects of communication have actually been demonstrated or, -- in the case of many simulation studies --- tacitly built-in to the system at the outset. For example, predication and syntactic constituent structure have never been shown to emerge in robotic or software studies (without bringing them in tacitly with the tools of computer science).
We also argue that stochastic effects of finite sampling and variational noise are the main mechanisms behind many claims for `self-organisation' and `diversity' of communication in simulation studies.
Current work at the University of Hertfordshire by the speaker, J. Baillie, K. Dautenhahn, and research students addresses how some linguistic abilities can arise in populations of interacting agents. This seminar is intended to serve as a tutorial for new researchers in the field.
Reference:
C. L. Nehaniv, "The Making of Meaning in Societies: Semiotic &
Information-Theoretic Background to the Evolution of
Communication", Proc. AISB Symposium: Starting from Society - the
application of social analogies to computational systems, 19-20
April 2000, Society for the Study of Artificial Intelligence and
Adaptive Behaviour, pp. 73-84, 2000.
http://homepages.feis.herts.ac.uk/~nehaniv/sfsn.ps