=Paper=
{{Paper
|id=Vol-1926/intro1
|storemode=property
|title=Experimental Semiotics and Representation by Dialogue Systems
|pdfUrl=https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-1926/invited.pdf
|volume=Vol-1926
|authors=T. Mark Ellison
|dblpUrl=https://dblp.org/rec/conf/ijcai/Ellison17
}}
==Experimental Semiotics and Representation by Dialogue Systems==
https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-1926/invited.pdf
(Invited Talk)
Experimental Semiotics and Representation by Dialogue Systems
T. Mark Ellison
College of Asia and the Pacific, Australian National University, Australia
m.ellison@anu.edu.au
Abstract The likely reason for this that as messagers routinise their
representations, more cognitive resources become available
This talk presents implications from Experimen-
for elaborating the message. Without indication that their
tal Semiotics for dialogue systems. Experimental
partner has received the communication, messagers over-
Semiotics investigates human communication by
communicate.
forcing participants to create new communication
systems, or adapt existing systems in new ways to The implication for artificial dialogue systems is that iden-
achieve joint goals. The key results in this field tifying signals that a communication has been understood is
show the importance of interaction, indirect rep- crucial to efficient communication. Likewise, the dialogue
resentation, iconicity, and systematicity in the rep- system should provide such signals when it has been able to
resentations of concepts. These in turn elucidate interpret its input successfully, and does not need further elab-
key expectations humans have for their interlocu- oration.
tors during dialogues.
3 Indirect Representation and Symbol
1 Introduction Grounding
Experimental Semiotics (see [Galantucci and Garrod, 2011]) One of the dynamics of communication systems developed in
is a line of psychological research focussing on the experi- laboratories is refinement. This is where representations be-
mental investigation of novel forms of human communica- come progressively simplified and conventionalised as their
tion. user base becomes more familiar with them. As the repre-
A standard experiment in this field selects a particular sentations become simpler and more conventional, they usual
medium or format and forces participants to use this medium also become less iconic and more symbolic.
or format to collaborate in solving a task that requires com- This process is one of progressively indirect represen-
munication. For example, in the Pictionary task [Garrod et tational grounding. The initial iconic representations are
al., 2010], participants must communicate by drawing (but grounded naturally because of their iconicity. Subsequent
without writing) a series of objects in a given order to their representations of the same concept are representations partly
partner who has the same list but in a randomised order. The of the object, but partly of the previous representation it-
participants succeed each time the correct item on the list is self. If previous representations are sufficiently distinctive,
identified. and suitably distinctive parts of them are reproduced, we end
In another task, participants must convey a route on a map up with progressively simpler representations, which because
to their partner who has the same map, and knows the start of the indirection of representation, can become increasingly
and end points. The closer the path drawn by the matcher opaque for those not party to the evolution of the sign. Later
to the path given to the director, the better the result. The representations, like earlier ones, are grounded iconically, but
participants in this task communicate solely by a text-only not in the reference itself, but in earlier representations.
chat interface.
There are some features of human communication which
this paradigm has highlighted which may be instructive for 4 Community
AI dialogue systems which aim to be more human like. Another result [Fay et al., 2008] in Experimental Semiotics
is representations developed in communities have a number
2 Interaction of properties not shared by those developed by single dyads.
A number of experiments have compared what happens in in- These are greater accessibility to participants who have not
teractive vs non-interactive communications. One key finding been party to the shared history. This accessibility can be
has been that in non-interactive circumstances, messages be- accounted for [Fay and Ellison, 2013] as retained iconicity –
come progressively longer and more elaborate. In contrast, in it is iconicity which is retained despite the simplicity of the
interaction, messages become shorter and more concise. sign resulting from refinement.
1
The importance for dialogue systems development is the
recognition that not all refinements to a referential representa-
tion are of equal value according to objective criteria, and that
people recognise and choose between them based on these
criteria [Tamariz et al., 2014]. Some options are intrinsically
better than others, and selecting the more transparent repre-
sentations leads over time to more acceptable representations.
Failure to adopt a clearly superior representation would lead
communicative partners to question the motives of a commu-
nicative partner.
5 Systematicity
Finally, yet-unpublished work indicates that communicators
reuse representations for similar (but distinct) references.
While some theories suggested that representational forms
would only be reused in a structured way when the seman-
tic space became crowded, our results show that even a single
similar reference is likely to trigger reuse of representational
form. In a dialogue, this means that a new salient object that
is similar to an existing one is likely to be referenced by a
similar representation (more than would be expected by the
need for denotational accuracy), but with a clear differenti-
ating additional sign component. In verbal discourse, this
type of representation corresponds to using an utterance of
the form another X but this time Y where X is a category
shared with the previous item, and Y is a distinguishing fea-
ture. This construction is called systematicity as the com-
municator is constructing a system in which shifts form and
meaning run parallel.
In conclusion, there are a number of lessons for artificial
dialogue systems - whose end goal is communication - in ex-
perimental work exploring how humans communicate.
References
[Fay and Ellison, 2013] Nicolas Fay and T Mark Ellison.
The cultural evolution of human communication systems
in different sized populations: usability trumps learnabil-
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[Fay et al., 2008] Nicolas Fay, Simon Garrod, and Leo
Roberts. The fitness and functionality of culturally evolved
communication systems. Philosophical Transactions of
the Royal Society of London B: Biological Sciences,
363(1509):3553–3561, 2008.
[Galantucci and Garrod, 2011] Bruno Galantucci and Simon
Garrod. Experimental semiotics: a review. Frontiers in
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[Garrod et al., 2010] Simon Garrod, Nicolas Fay, Shane
Rogers, Bradley Walker, and Nik Swoboda. Can iterated
learning explain the emergence of graphical symbols? In-
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