Showing papers on "Semiosphere published in 2001"

A Missing Link : The Role of Semiotics in Multiagent Enviroments

Abstract: Approaches to artificial intelligence research based on autonomous agents have thus far primarily relied on cognitive science and other psychologically motivated approaches to the social world. These approaches have been a logical outcome of the researchers' concentration on agent building. However, recent developments in the field have revealed the need for a wider and primarily socially centered interpretive framework in which to account for or model the agents' behavior. Dautenhahn's attempt to interpret the agents' social behavior has been based (frequently only implicitly) on macro-sociological approaches and biologically motivated evolutionary determinist theories. In order to make autonomous agents truly "sociallly intelligent", researchers will sooner or later need to take microsociological theories into consideration.The fact that these theories are interaction and communication-centered opens up the possibility for a relevant application of semiotic theories in the field of AI. This paper outlines the elements of several classical semiotic theories potentially useful in current and future AI research centered on autonomous agent modeling. Briefly discussed are Greimas-Courtes's distinction between actor and actant, Tartu-Moscow school notions of semiosphere and culture as secondary modeling system, Jakobson's notion of the functions of language, and Eco's semiotic approach to semantics, as expressed by his notion of cultural encyclopedia.