CLASP
The Centre for Linguistic Theory and Studies in Probability

A Model for Attention-Driven Judgements in Type Theory with Records

Abstract:

Joint work with John D. Kelleher, Dublin Institute of Technology, Ireland

Type Theory with Records (TTR) has been proposed as a formal representational framework and a semantic model for embodied agents participating in situated dialogues (Dobnik et al., 2014). Although TTR has many potential advantages as a semantic model for embodied agents, one problem it faces is the combinatorial explosion of types that is implicit in the framework due to the fact that new types can be created dynamically by composing existing types.

A consequence of this combinatorial explosion is that the agent is left with an intractable problem of deciding which types to assign to perceptual data. The term judgement is the technical term used in TTR to describe the assignment of a type to perceptual data that in practice would be implemented as a sensory classification.

This paper makes 3 contributions to the discussion on the applicability of TTR to embodied agents. First, it highlights the problem of the combinatorial explosion of type assignment in TTR. Second, it presents a judgement control mechanism, based on the Load Theory of selective attention and cognitive control (Lavie et al., 2004), that addresses this problem. Third, it presents a computational framework, based on POMDPs (Kaelbling et al., 1998), that offers a basis for future practical experimentation on the feasibility of the proposed approach.

Lecturer:

Simon Dobnik is Senior Lecturer at the University of Gothenburg