LLMs and the Human Condition

This paper presents three established theories of human decision-making and describes how they can be integrated to provide a model of purposive human action. Taking seriously the idea of language as action the model is then applied to the conversational user interfaces. Theory based AI research has had a hard time recently and the aim here is to revitalise interest in understanding what LLMs are actually doing other than running poorly understood machine learning routines over all the data the relevant Big Tech company can hoover up. When a raspberry pi computer for under 50USD is up to 400 times faster than the first commercial Cray super computer~\cite{crayVpi}, Big Tech can get really close to having an infinite number of monkeys typing at random and producing text, some of which will make sense. By understanding where ChatGPT's apparent intelligence comes from, perhaps we can perform the magic with fewer resources and at the same time gain some understanding about our relationship with our world.

Revisiting the DARPA Communicator Data using Conversation Analysis

The state of the art in human computer conversation leaves something to be desired and, indeed, talking to a computer can be down-right annoying. This paper describes an approach to identifying ``opportunities for improvement'' in these systems by looking for abuse in the form of swear words. The premise is that humans swear at computers as a sanction and, as such, swear words represent a point of failure where the system did not behave as it should. Having identified where things went wrong, we can work backward through the transcripts and, using conversation analysis (CA) work out how things went wrong. Conversation analysis is a qualitative methodology and can appear quite alien - indeed unscientific - to those of us from a quantitative background. The paper starts with a description of Conversation analysis in its modern form, and then goes on to apply the methodology to transcripts of frustrated and annoyed users in the DARPA Communicator project. The conclusion is that there is at least one species of failure caused by the inability of the Communicator systems to handle mixed initiative at the discourse structure level. Along the way, I hope to demonstrate that there is an alternative future for computational linguistics that does not rely on larger and larger text corpora.

An Enactivist account of Mind Reading in Natural Language Understanding

In this paper we apply our understanding of the radical enactivist agenda to a classic AI-hard problem. Natural Language Understanding is a sub-field of AI research that looked easy to the pioneers. Thus the Turing Test, in its original form, assumed that the computer could use language and the challenge was to fake human intelligence. It turned out that playing chess and formal logic were easy compared to the necessary language skills. The techniques of good old-fashioned AI (GOFAI) assume symbolic representation is the core of reasoning and human communication consisted of transferring representations from one mind to another. But by this model one finds that representations appear in another's mind, without appearing in the intermediary language. People communicate by mind reading it seems. Systems with speech interfaces such as Alexa and Siri are of course common but they are limited. Rather than adding mind reading skills, we introduced a "cheat" that enabled our systems to fake it. The cheat is simple and only slightly interesting to computer scientists and not at all interesting to philosophers. However, reading about the enactivist idea that we "directly perceive" the intentions of others, our cheat took on a new light and in this paper look again at how natural language understanding might actually work between humans.

Mind Reading at Work: Cooperation without common ground

As Stefan Kopp and Nicole Kramer say in their recent paper[Frontiers in Psychology 12 (2021) 597], despite some very impressive demonstrations over the last decade or so, we still don't know how how to make a computer have a half decent conversation with a human. They argue that the capabilities required to do this include incremental joint co-construction and mentalizing. Although agreeing whole heartedly with their statement of the problem, this paper argues for a different approach to the solution based on the "new" AI of situated action.

Introducing the Talk Markup Language :Adding a little social intelligence to industrial speech interfaces

Virtual Personal Assistants like Siri have great potential but such developments hit the fundamental problem of how to make computational devices that understand human speech. Natural language understanding is one of the more disappointing failures of AI research and it seems there is something we computer scientists don't get about the nature of language. Of course philosophers and linguists think quite differently about language and this paper describes how we have taken ideas from other disciplines and implemented them. The background to the work is to take seriously the notion of language as action and look at what people actually do with language using the techniques of Conversation Analysis. The observation has been that human communication is (behind the scenes) about the management of social relations as well as the (foregrounded) passing of information. To claim this is one thing but to implement it requires a mechanism. The mechanism described here is based on the notion of language being intentional - we think intentionally, talk about them and recognise them in others - and cooperative in that we are compelled to help out. The way we are compelled points to a solution to the ever present problem of keeping the human on topic. The approach has led to a recent success in which we significantly improve user satisfaction independent of task completion. Talk Markup Language (TalkML) is a draft alternative to VoiceXML that, we propose, greatly simplifies the scripting of interaction by providing default behaviours for no input and not recognised speech events.