IRC Seminar, presented by Toyoaki Nishida: "Envisioning Common Ground Process beneath Conversation"

Abstract:

Even today when AI has defeated human champions in many disciplines, we still have much difficulties with talking with AI. From time to time, similar difficulties happen even in human-human conversation particularly when participants come from different cultures. As we love abundance and versatility of communication functions brought about in conversation that are so natural to us, developing technologies for overcoming these difficulties may make sense to retain conversation as a primary communication channel in the AI era.

We characterize conversation as a continuous update of common ground in a collaborative fashion by bringing together pieces of knowledge, belief, experience. We attempt to portray in a computational fashion how common ground is updated in conversation. On the engineering side, we believe it will help us build a conversational AI that can naturally participate in our conversation and help us establish and maintain common ground. On the scientific side, it will lead us to better understanding of conversation, and eventually our mind.

Short Bio on Presenter:

Toyoaki Nishida is Professor and Dean at Faculty of Informatics, the University of Fukuchiyama. He received the B.E., the M.E., and the Doctor of Engineering degrees from Kyoto University in 1977, 1979, and 1984, respectively. Before he moved to his present position, he was a professor at Kyoto University, the University of Tokyo and Nara Advanced Institute of Science and Technology. His research centers on artificial intelligence and human computer interaction. He opened up a new field of research called conversational informatics in 2003. He edited and co-authored three books on conversational informatics and related topics from Wiley and Springer.