This article proposes a number of models to examine through which mechanisms a population of autonomous agents could arrive at a repertoire of perceptually grounded categories that is sufficiently shared to allow successful communication. The models are inspired by the main approaches to human categorisation being discussed in the literature: nativism, empiricism, and culturalism. Colour is taken as a case study. Although we take no stance on which position is to be accepted as final truth with respect to human categorisation (...) and naming, we do point to theoretical constraints that make each position more or less likely and we make clear suggestions on what the best engineering solution would be. Specifically, we argue that the collective choice of a shared repertoire must integrate multiple constraints, including constraints coming from communication. Key Words: autonomous agents; colour categorisation; colour naming; connectionism; cultural evolution; genetic evolution; memes; origins of language; self-organisation; semiotic dynamics; symbol grounding. (shrink)

If we are eventually to understand the capability of higher organisms for perceptual recognition, generalization, recall, and thinking, we must first have answers to three fundamental questions: 1. How is information about the physical world sensed, or detected, by the biological system? 2. In what form is information stored, or remembered? 3. How does information contained in storage, or in memory, influence recognition and behavior? The first of these questions is in the.

Traditional mechanistic accounts of language processing derive almost entirely from the study of monologue. Yet, the most natural and basic form of language use is dialogue. As a result, these accounts may only offer limited theories of the mechanisms that underlie language processing in general. We propose a mechanistic account of dialogue, the interactive alignment account, and use it to derive a number of predictions about basic language processes. The account assumes that, in dialogue, the linguistic representations employed by the (...) interlocutors become aligned at many levels, as a result of a largely automatic process. This process greatly simplifies production and comprehension in dialogue. After considering the evidence for the interactive alignment model, we concentrate on three aspects of processing that follow from it. It makes use of a simple interactive inference mechanism, enables the development of local dialogue routines that greatly simplify language processing, and explains the origins of self-monitoring in production. We consider the need for a grammatical framework that is designed to deal with language in dialogue rather than monologue, and discuss a range of implications of the account. Key Words: common ground; dialogue; dialogue routines; language comprehension; language production; monitoring; perception-behavior link. (shrink)

This paper is part of a broader project whose aim is to present a coherent unified approach to natural language dialogue semantics using tools from type theory. Here we explore aspects of our approach which relate to situation theory and situation semantics. We first point out a relationship between type theory and the Austinian notion of truth. We then consider how records in type theory might be used to represent situations and how dependent record types can be used to model (...) constraints on situations. We then sketch treatments of attitude phenomena for which Barwise and Perry proposed situation semantic analyses (perception complements, belief, the Pierre puzzle) as well as two other intensional phenomena (intensional verbs and intentional identity). Finally we give a characterisation of the type theory used and a small illustrative fragment of English. (shrink)