Probabilistic Dialogue Models for Dynamic Ontology Mapping

TLDR: In this paper, the content of a message is described using an interaction model: the entities to which the terms refer are correlated with other entities in the interaction, and they may also have prior probabilities determined by earlier, similar interactions.

Abstract: Agents need to communicate in order to accomplish tasks that they are unable to perform alone. Communication requires agents to share a common ontology, a strong assumption in open environments where agents from different backgrounds meet briefly, making it impossible to map all the ontologies in advance. An agent, when it receives a message, needs to compare the foreign terms in the message with all the terms in its own local ontology, searching for the most similar one. However, the content of a message may be described using an interaction model: the entities to which the terms refer are correlated with other entities in the interaction, and they may also have prior probabilities determined by earlier, similar interactions. Within the context of an interaction it is possible to predict the set of possible entities a received message may contain, and it is possible to sacrifice recall for efficiency by comparing the foreign terms only with the most probable local ones. This allows a novel form of dynamic ontology matching.