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Communication could potentially be an effective way for multi-agent cooperation. However, information sharing among all agents or in predefined communication architectures that existing methods adopt can be problematic. When there is a…
Existing dialog datasets contain a sequence of utterances and responses without any explicit background knowledge associated with them. This has resulted in the development of models which treat conversation as a sequence-to-sequence…
Cooperative communication plays a central role in theories of human cognition, language, development, culture, and human-robot interaction. Prior models of cooperative communication are algorithmic in nature and do not shed light on why…
Natural language has long enabled human cooperation, but its lossy, ambiguous, and indirect nature limits the potential of collective intelligence. While machines are not subject to these constraints, most LLM-based multi-agent systems…
Conversational grounding is a collaborative mechanism for establishing mutual knowledge among participants engaged in a dialogue. This experimental study analyzes information-seeking conversations to investigate the capabilities of large…
In this paper I describe how miscommunication problems are dealt with in the spoken language system DIALOGOS. The dialogue module of the system exploits dialogic expectations in a twofold way: to model what future user utterance might be…
Artificial intelligence systems exhibit many useful capabilities, but they appear to lack understanding. This essay describes how we could go about constructing a machine capable of understanding. As John Locke (1689) pointed out words are…
Humans communicate using systems of interconnected stimuli or concepts -- from language and music to literature and science -- yet it remains unclear how, if at all, the structure of these networks supports the communication of information.…
Many practical applications of dialogue technology require the generation of responses according to a particular developer-specified persona. While a variety of personas can be elicited from recent large language models, the opaqueness and…
There is significant evidence that real-world communication cannot be reduced to sending signals with context-independent meaning. In this work, based on a variant of the classical Lewis (1969) signaling model, we explore the conditions for…
Communication of information in complex systems can be considered as major driver of systems evolution. What matters is not the communicated information by itself but rather the meaning that is supplied to the information. However…
There is substantial variability in the expectations that communication partners bring into interactions, creating the potential for misunderstandings. To directly probe these gaps and our ability to overcome them, we propose a…
Knowledge-grounded dialogue systems are intended to convey information that is based on evidence provided in a given source text. We discuss the challenges of training a generative neural dialogue model for such systems that is controlled…
A key property of linguistic conventions is that they hold over an entire community of speakers, allowing us to communicate efficiently even with people we have never met before. At the same time, much of our language use is…
Evolution and propagation of the world's languages is a complex phenomenon, driven, to a large extent, by social interactions. Multilingual society can be seen as a system of interacting agents, where the interaction leads to a modification…
Humans have a powerful and mysterious capacity to reason. Working through a set of mental steps enables us to make inferences we would not be capable of making directly even though we get no additional data from the world. Similarly, when…
Emergent communication protocols among humans and artificial neural network agents do not yet share the same properties and show some critical mismatches in results. We describe three important phenomena with respect to the emergence and…
Emergent communication offers insight into how agents develop shared structured representations, yet most research assumes homogeneous modalities or aligned representational spaces, overlooking the perceptual heterogeneity of real-world…
A major obstacle in analyzing the evolution of information exchange and processing is our insufficient understanding of the underlying signaling and decision-making biological mechanisms. For instance, it is unclear why are humans unique in…
Languages vary widely in how meanings map to word forms. These mappings have been found to support efficient communication; however, this theory does not account for systematic relations within word forms. We examine how a restricted set of…