The Communication Problem

  • Michael Straeubig
Parole chiave: communication, AI, systems theory, constructivism, cybernetics, language

Abstract

Analysis, interpretation and construction of artificial and natural languages have been central concerns of artificial intelligence since the 1950s.

Current applications for automated language progressing range from real-time translation of spoken language through automated discovery of sentiment in online postings to conversational agents embedded in everyday devices. Recent developments in machine learning, combined with the availability of large amounts of labelled training data, have enabled non-structural approaches to largely surpass classical techniques based on formal grammars, conceptual ontologies and symbolic representations. As the complexity and opaqueness of those stochastic models becomes more and more evident, however, the question arises if we trade gains in observable performance with a literal loss of understanding. This article presents a distinction-based approach to critically re-visit fundamental theoretical concepts such as code, information, language, communication and meaning. I will follow Niklas Luhmann’s theory of social systems by locating communication firmly within social systems. Departing from Luhmann, I do invite machines as participants into some of these systems. Finally, I propose to employ Friedemann Schulz von Thun’s 4-sided communication model in order to overcome the current information-theoretic emphasis of communication.

Riferimenti bibliografici

Allen, J.F. (1995), Natural language understanding, Pearson, Redwood City (Ca).

Allwood, J. (1978), «A Bird’s Eye View of Pragmatics», in Gregersen, K. (ed.), Papers from the Fourth Scandinavian Conference of Linguistics, Odense University Press, pp. 145-159.

Ashby, W.R. (1956), An Introduction to Cybernetics, Martino Fine Books, Eastford.

Austin, J.L. (1962), How to do things with words: the William James lectures delivered at Harvard University in 1955, Harvard Univ. Press, Cambridge (Mass).

Baecker, D. (1997), «Reintroducing Communication into Cybernetics», in Systemica, vol. 11, pp. 11-29.

Bard, N. et al. (2019), «The Hanabi Challenge: A New Frontier for AI Research», in arXiv:1902.00506, from: http://arxiv.org/abs/1902.00506.

Barrett, M. (ed.) (1999), The development of language, Psychology Press, Hove.

Bateson, G. (1972), «Form, substance and difference», in Steps to an ecology of mind, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 2000, pp. 454-471.

Bühler, K. (1934), Theory of Language: The representational function of language, John Benjamins Publishing Company, Amsterdam.

Bunt, H. (1994), «Context and Dialogue Control», in Think, vol. 3, pp. 19-31.

Cangelosi, A., Schlesinger, M. (2015), Developmental robotics: from babies to robots, The MIT Press, Cambridge (Mass).

Carletta, J. et al. (1997), «The Reliability of a Dialogue Structure Coding Scheme», in Computational Linguistics, vol. 23, n. 1, pp. 13-31.

Chalmers, D.J. (1995), «Facing up to the problem of consciousness», in Journal of consciousness studies, vol. 2, n. 3, pp. 200-219.

Chihara, C.S., Fodor, J.A. (1965), «Operationalism and Ordinary Language: A Critique of Wittgenstein», in American Philosophical Quarterly, vol. 2, n. 4, pp. 281-295.

Chomsky, N. (1957), Syntactic structures, Martino, Mansfield Centre (Conn.).

Cohen, P.R. (2005), «If not Turing’s test, then what?», in AI magazine, vol. 26, n. 4, p. 61.

Drescher, G.L. (1991), Made-up minds: a constructivist approach to artificial intelligence, MIT Press, Cambridge (Mass).

Eco, U. (1978), A theory of semiotics, Indiana University Press, Bloomington.

Epstein, R.S., Roberts, G., Beber, G. (2009), Parsing the Turing test: philosophical and methodological issues in the quest for the thinking computer, Springer, Dordrecht, London.

Floridi, L. (2011), The philosophy of information, Oxford Univ. Press, Oxford.

Gleick, J. (2011), The information: a history, a theory, a flood, Vintage Books, New York.

Goffman, E. (1990), The presentation of self in everyday life, Penguin, London.

Grice, H.P. (2013), «Logic and Conversation», in Ezcurdia, M. (ed.), The semantics-pragmatics boundary in philosophy, Broadview Press, Peterborough (Ont.), pp. 47-59.

Grosz, B.J., Sidner, C.L. (1986), «Attention, intentions and the structure of discourse», in Computational Linguistics, vol. 12, n. 3, p. 30.

Harnad, S. (1990), «The Symbol Grounding Problem», in Physica, vol. D, n. 42, pp. 335-346.

Harnad, S. (1992), «The Turing Test is not a trick: Turing indistinguishability is a scientific criterion», in ACM SIGART Bulletin, vol. 3, n. 4, pp. 9-10.

Hayes, P., Ford, K. (1995), «Turing test considered harmful», in IJCAI (1), pp. 972-977.

Hernández-Orallo, J. (2014), «AI Evaluation: past, present and future», in arXiv preprint arXiv:1408.6908, from: http://arxiv.org/abs/1408.6908.

Hingston, P. (ed.) (2012), Believable bots: can computers play like people?, Springer, Berlin, New York.

Jurafsky, D., Martin, J. H. (2009), Speech and language processing: an introduction to natural language processing, computational linguistics, and speech recognition, Prentice Hall, Pearson Education Internat, Upper Saddle River (NJ).

Kottur, S. et al. (2017), «Natural Language Does Not Emerge ‘Naturally’ in Multi-Agent Dialog», in Proceedings of the 2017 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, Association for Computational Linguistics, Copenhagen, pp. 2962-2967.

Kurzweil, R. (2009), The singularity is near: when humans transcend biology, Duckworth, London.

Lewin, I. and Lane, M. (2000), «A formal model of Conversational Game Theory», in In Proc. Gotalog-00, 4th Workshop on the Semantics and Pragmatics of Dialogue, Gothenburg.

Luhmann, N. (1996), Social systems, Stanford University Press, Stanford.

Marr, D. (1982), Vision: a computational investigation into the human representation and processing of visual information, Freeman, New York, 2000.

Maturana, H.R., Varela, F.J. (1980), Autopoiesis and cognition: the realization of the living, D. Reidel Pub. Co., Dordrecht, Boston.

McCarthy, J. et al. (1955), «A Proposal for the Dartmouth Summer Research Project on Artificial Intelligence», in AI Magazine, vol. 27, n. 4, p. 3, 2006.

McCarthy, J. (1996), What is Artificial Intelligence?, Computer Science Department, Stanford University, 2007, from: http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/whatisai/node1.html.

McClamrock, R. (1991), «Marr’s three levels: A re-evaluation», in Minds and Machines, vol. 1, n. 2, pp. 185-196.

McGinn, C. (1996), «Thought and Language», in The character of mind: an introduction to the philosophy of mind, Oxford University Press, Oxford, New York, pp. 83-106.

Minsky, M.L. (1969), Semantic information processing, The MIT Press, Cambridge, London 2015.

Minsky, M.L. (1974), A Framework for representing knowledge, Memo 306, MIT AI Laboratory.

Morris, C.W. (1971), Writings on the General Theory of Signs, De Gruyter Mouton, The Hague, Paris.

Neff, G. (2016), «Talking to Bots: Symbiotic Agency and the Case of Tay», in International Journal of Communication, vol. 10, pp. 4915-4931.

Pandorabots, Inc. (2019), Pandorabots, from: www.pandorabots.com.

Piaget, J. (1952), The Origins of Intelligence in Children, International Universities Press, New York.

Power, R. (1979), «The organisation of purposeful dialogues», in Linguistics, vol. 17, n. 1-2.

Powers, D.M.W. (1998), «The total Turing test and the Loebner prize», in Proceedings of the Joint Conferences on New Methods in Language Processing and Computational Natural Language Learning, pp. 279-280.

Radford, A., Wu, J., Child, R. et al. (2019a), Language Models are Unsupervised Multitask Learners, OpenAI.

Radford, A., Wu, J., Amodei, D. et al. (2019b), Better Language Models and Their Implications, OpenAI, from: https://openai.com/blog/better-language-models/.

Russell, S.J., Norvig, P. (2010), Artificial intelligence: a modern approach, Prentice Hall, Upper Saddle River.

Schlangen, D. (2009), «What we can learn from Dialogue Systems that don’t work», in Proceedings of DiaHolmia, the 13th International Workshop on the Semantics and Pragmatics of Dialogue, (SEMDIAL 2009), pp. 51-58.

Schmidhuber, J. (2010), «Formal Theory of Creativity, Fun, and Intrinsic Motivation (1990-2010)», in IEEE Transactions on Autonomous Mental Development, vol. 2, n. 3, pp. 230-247.

Schulz von Thun, F. (1981), Miteinander reden: Störungen und Klärungen: Psychologie der zwischenmenschlichen Kommunikation, Rowohlt, Reinbek bei Hamburg.

Searle, J.R. (1969), Speech acts: an essay in the philosophy of language, Cambridge Univ. Press, Cambridge, 2011.

Searle, J.R. (1980), «Minds, brains, and programs», in Behavioral and Brain Sciences, vol. 3, n. 3, pp. 417-457.

Shannon, C.E. (1948), «A mathematical theory of communication», in The Bell System Technical Journal, vol. 27, pp. 379-423, 623-656.

Shannon, C.E. (1956), «The bandwagon», in IRE Transactions on Information Theory, vol. 2, n. 1, p. 3.

Shannon, C.E., Weaver, W. (1949), The mathematical theory of communication, Univ. of Illinois Press, Urbana, 1998.

Steels, L. (2008), «The symbol grounding problem has been solved. so what’s next», in Symbols and embodiment: Debates on meaning and cognition, pp. 223-244.

Straeubig, M. (2017), «Let the Machines out. Towards Hybrid Social Systems», in Proceedings of AISB Annual Convention 2017, Society for the Study of Artificial Intelligence and Simulation of Behaviour (AISB), Bath, pp. 28-31.

Sutskever, I., Martens, J., Hinton, G. (2011), «Generating Text with Recurrent Neural Networks», in Proceedings of the 28th International Conference on International Conference on Machine Learning, Omnipress, Anderson St, Madison (Wi), pp. 1017-1024.

Thornton, T. (1998), Wittgenstein on language and thought: the philosophy of content, Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh.

Tomasello, M. (2005), Constructing a language: a usage-based theory of language acquisition, Harvard Univ. Press, Cambridge (Mass.).

Turing, A. (1950), «Computing machinery and intelligence», in Mind, 59 (236), pp. 433-460.

Wallace, R.S. (2003), The Elements of AIML Style, ALICE A.I. Foundation, Inc.

Watzlawick, P., Bavelas, J.B., Jackson, D.D. (2014), Pragmatics of human communication: a study of interactional patterns, pathologies, and paradoxes, W. W. Norton & Company, New York.

Weizenbaum, J. (1966), «ELIZA-a computer program for the study of natural language communication between man and machine», in Communications of the ACM, vol. 9, n. 1, pp. 36-45.

Wen, T.-H. et al. (2015), «Stochastic Language Generation in Dialogue using Recurrent Neural Networks with Convolutional Sentence Reranking», in Proceedings of the 16th Annual Meeting of the Special Interest Group on Discourse and Dialogue, Association for Computational Linguistics, Prague, pp. 275-284.

Wittgenstein, L. (1922), Tractatus logico-philosophicus, Cosimo Classics, New Jork, 2007.

Wittgenstein, L. (1958), Philosophical investigations, Basil Blackwell, Oxford.

Worswick, S. (2019), Mitsuku, from: http://www.mitsuku.com.

Wu, X., Martinez, A., Klyen, M. (2018), «Dialog Generation Using Multi-Turn Reasoning Neural Networks», in Proceedings of the 2018 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, Vol. 1, Association for Computational Linguistics, New Orleans, pp. 2049-2059.

Zador, A. (2019), «A Critique of Pure Learning: What Artificial Neural Networks can Learn from Animal Brains», in bioRxiv, from: http://biorxiv.org/lookup/doi/10.1101/582643.

Pubblicato
2020-12-30
Come citare
Straeubig, M. (2020) «The Communication Problem », Rivista Italiana di Filosofia del Linguaggio, 14(2). doi: 10.4396/AISB201906.