Language Evolution and Computation Bibliography

The problem of heterogeneous case representation poses a major obstacle to realising real-life multi-case-base reasoning (MCBR) systems. The knowledge overhead in developing and maintaining translation protocols between distributed case bases poses a serious challenge to CBR developers. In this paper, we situate CBR as a flexible problem-solving strategy that relies on several heterogeneous knowledge containers. We introduce a technique called language games to solve the interoperability issue. Our technique has two phases. The first is an eager learning phase where case bases communicate to build a shared indexing lexicon of similar cases in the distributed network. The second is the problem-solving phase where, using the distributed index, a case base can quickly consult external case bases if the local solution is insufficient. We provide a detailed description of our approach and demonstrate its effectiveness using an evaluation on a real data set from the tourism domain.

The blogosphere refers to the distributed network of user opinions published on the WWW. Whereas centralized review sites such Amazon.com previously allowed users to post opinions on goods such as books and CDs, blogging software allows users to publish opinions on any topic without constraints on predefined schema. However, centralized review sites such as Amazon.com have one significant advantage: reviews pertaining to a single topic are collected together in one place, allowing readers to peruse a diverse range of opinions quickly. In this paper we examine how such a topic-centric view of the Blogosphere can be created. We characterise the problems in aligning similar concepts created by a set of distributed, autonomous users and describe current initiatives to solve the problem. Finally, we introduce the Tagsocratic project, a novel initiative to solve the concept alignment problem using techniques derived from research in language acquisition among distributed, autonomous agents.

Early agent research recognised that co-operating agents require access to unambiguous, semantic description of the same concept, entity or object. In fact, agent-based research on this problem anticipates many of the current initiatives of the Semantic Web project. The proposed solution involves developing a domain-specific ontology that can be mapped to other ontologies as required. In this paper we describe an alternative approach which allows autonomous agents to index shared objects without requiring ex-ante agreement on an ontology. Using a process of distributed negotiation, each agent builds a lexicon of the problem-solving competences of other agents. We present an overview of our work using this approach in three domains: a web services scenario, a multi-case-based agent approach and finally, Tagsocratic, a blog-indexing service. We then describe our future work on several open issues related to this research.