Date: 11:15, 12 September 2016
Venue: F.17. Colin Maclaurin Building, Heriot-Watt University
Title: Semantic Alignment for Agent Interactions: making communication meaningful in open environments
Speaker: Paula Chocrón, Artificial Intelligence Research Institute (IIIA-CSIC)
Abstract: The fact that the meaning of words depends on the context in which they are used is evident for any speaker: if someone asks for chips in a cafeteria, she will unlikely be expecting to get electronic circuits. In human dialogues this kind of semantic alignment happens permanently and has been extensively studied.
In this talk I will discuss how these ideas can also be applied to help achieve meaningful communication in artificial multi-agent systems, in which heterogeneous interlocutors will likely use different vocabularies. I will start by presenting a notion of context that is based on the formal specifications of the tasks performed by agents. I will then show how this context can be used by the agents to align their vocabularies dynamically, by learning mappings from the experience of previous interactions. In doing so, we will also rethink the traditional approach to semantic matching and its evaluation, tackling the following questions: What does it mean for agents to “understand each other”? When is an alignment good for a particular application? How can the interaction context help interoperability?
Bio: Paula Chocrón is a PhD student at the Artificial Intelligence Research Institute (IIIA-CSIC) in Barcelona, Spain. She is part of the ESSENCE Marie Curie ITN, which funds PhD projects on topics related to the evolution of shared semantics in artificial environments in different European institutes. Paula is currently interested on studying the relation between the fields of ontology matching and multi-agent communication.