A Communicative Action Framework for Discourse Strategies for AI-based Systems: The MetTrains Application Case

Increasing attention is being paid to the challenges of how artificial intelligence (AI)-based systems offer explanations to users. Explanation capabilities developed for older logic-based systems still have relevance, but new thinking is needed in designing explanations and other discourse strategies for new forms of AI that include machine learning. In this work-in-progress paper we show how a communicative action design framework can be used to design an AI-based system’s interface to achieve desired goals. The applicability of the framework is demonstrated with an interface for an intelligent video surveillance system for reducing railway suicide. The communicative action framework is an important step in theory development for human-computer interaction with AI as used in the information systems domain

The role of communicative creativity in starting regional trade relationships with China: An action research practitioner case study

The Action Research project studies the role of information management and knowledge generation in establishing overseas political and trade activity to assist regional development in Australia. It is the work of a researcher whose background in information management ranges across more than 30 years working in the newspaper and regional economic development industries. It applies a hybrid term called “communicative creativity” – distilled from Wieman’s (1963) Doctrine of Creative Interchange and Habermas’s (1984) Theory of Communicative Action – to the researcher’s professional practice of facilitating the development of two entities – the economic development organization and its method of facilitating opportunities in China – against Nonaka and Takeuchi’s (1995) Five-Phase Model of the Organisational Creation Process. The thesis describes how the researcher’s previous career and life experience in China are used in the establishment of a model that will assist his current career in regional economic development. It explains the reasons for choosing the Participatory Action Research method and uses the researcher’s personal and professional voices in a multi-vocal, neopragmatic style blended with visual rich picture presentation involving graphics and photos to tell the story. The thesis – with its style and voices – is a soft systems picture in its own right. The research outcome is a knowledge management model for promoting. Selling, organising and conducting a trade mission into China

A Framework for Exploring Conditional Factors Affecting User Participation in Information Systems Development

Improving user participation is critical to the success of information systems development (ISD). To this extent, Information Systems (IS) research posits that there are conditional factors that affecting the degree of user participation in ISD. The existing framework to identify these conditional factors lacks its explanatory power when different degrees of user participation are taken into consideration. As a result little is known how different degrees of user participation currently being employed in various IS projects can be enabled or facilitated. In this paper, based on Habermas’ theory of communicative action, we propose a framework to explore the conditional factors affecting different degrees of user participation in ISD. We demonstrate the value of the new framework by analysing the conditional factors that have been reported in the literature using the existing framework to inform the future research and development of the field

Planning multisentential English text using communicative acts

The goal of this research is to develop explanation presentation mechanisms for knowledge based systems which enable them to define domain terminology and concepts, narrate events, elucidate plans, processes, or propositions and argue to support a claim or advocate action. This requires the development of devices which select, structure, order and then linguistically realize explanation content as coherent and cohesive English text. With the goal of identifying generic explanation presentation strategies, a wide range of naturally occurring texts were analyzed with respect to their communicative sttucture, function, content and intended effects on the reader. This motivated an integrated theory of communicative acts which characterizes text at the level of rhetorical acts (e.g., describe, define, narrate), illocutionary acts (e.g., inform, request), and locutionary acts (e.g., ask, command). Taken as a whole, the identified communicative acts characterize the structure, content and intended effects of four types of text: description, narration, exposition, argument. These text types have distinct effects such as getting the reader to know about entities, to know about events, to understand plans, processes, or propositions, or to believe propositions or want to perform actions. In addition to identifying the communicative function and effect of text at multiple levels of abstraction, this dissertation details a tripartite theory of focus of attention (discourse focus, temporal focus, and spatial focus) which constrains the planning and linguistic realization of text. To test the integrated theory of communicative acts and tripartite theory of focus of attention, a text generation system TEXPLAN (Textual EXplanation PLANner) was implemented that plans and linguistically realizes multisentential and multiparagraph explanations from knowledge based systems. The communicative acts identified during text analysis were formalized as over sixty compositional and (in some cases) recursive plan operators in the library of a hierarchical planner. Discourse, temporal, and spatial focus models were implemented to track and use attentional information to guide the organization and realization of text. Because the plan operators distinguish between the communicative function (e.g., argue for a proposition) and the expected effect (e.g., the reader believes the proposition) of communicative acts, the system is able to construct a discourse model of the structure and function of its textual responses as well as a user model of the expected effects of its responses on the reader's knowledge, beliefs, and desires. The system uses both the discourse model and user model to guide subsequent utterances. To test its generality, the system was interfaced to a variety of domain applications including a neuropsychological diagnosis system, a mission planning system, and a knowledge based mission simulator. The system produces descriptions, narrations, expositions, and arguments from these applications, thus exhibiting a broader range of rhetorical coverage than previous text generation systems

Action theory in Habermas and educational practices

In this paper I explore the potential for viewing education as an “unrestricted communication community” (Habermas 1990: 88), using categorisations from Habermas of different kinds of action as analytical tools for examining educational practices. For the paper, I pursue two main themes: 1) how the concept of communicative action in relation to the three forms of knowledge-constitutive interest (Habermas 1987) can be operationalised in educational discourse 2) how the distinguishing of communicative action and discourse ethics from other forms of action may be used to understand the interaction taking place in educational contexts to develop evaluative tools for examining teaching practices. The potential of this framework for encouraging critical reflection on teaching, on critical incidents in teaching, peer observation, or tutor observation of novice practitioners is also discussed in relation to the forms of reflexivity that Habermas identifies as necessary conditions of human freedom (1996). Taken together, these different constructs form a powerful framework for critically examining the truth and validity claims both explicitly made and implied in educational practices from the perspectives of the individual as well as the professional community to which the individual belongs. It is accepted that a rational, communicative action aimed at reaching consensus does not necessarily dominate either the school or the higher education institution’s normal mode of discourse. Thus, the paper also differentiates other forms of action, incorporating these into the overall critical framework

Being-in-the-world-with: Presence Meets Social And Cognitive Neuroscience

In this chapter we will discuss the concepts of “presence” (Inner Presence) and “social presence” (Co-presence) within a cognitive and ecological perspective. Specifically, we claim that the concepts of “presence” and “social presence” are the possible links between self, action, communication and culture. In the first section we will provide a capsule view of Heidegger’s work by examining the two main features of the Heideggerian concept of “being”: spatiality and “being with”. We argue that different visions from social and cognitive sciences – Situated Cognition, Embodied Cognition, Enactive Approach, Situated Simulation, Covert Imitation - and discoveries from neuroscience – Mirror and Canonical Neurons - have many contact points with this view. In particular, these data suggest that our conceptual system dynamically produces contextualized representations (simulations) that support grounded action in different situations. This is allowed by a common coding – the motor code – shared by perception, action and concepts. This common coding also allows the subject for natively recognizing actions done by other selves within the phenomenological contents. In this picture we argue that the role of presence and social presence is to allow the process of self-identification through the separation between “self” and “other,” and between “internal” and “external”. Finally, implications of this position for communication and media studies are discussed by way of conclusion

e-Democracy driven by civil society: Developing a theoretical basis to design for bottom-up participation

This short paper outlines initial ideas for a programme of research related to e-Democracy which commences in October 2008 and will be undertaken over the next three years. The research specifically intends to focus on factors in the architecture of online discursive spaces which may affect sustained and meaningful participation. It begins by describing the context as it relates to Community Informatics (CI). It then outlines the nature of one of the online communities that will be at the centre of the enquiry. Finally, it outlines four theoretical perspectives which seem to offer a route to analysis and sense-making, suggesting how a synthesis of these perspectives might contribute to original insights for CI

PRESENCE: A human-inspired architecture for speech-based human-machine interaction

Recent years have seen steady improvements in the quality and performance of speech-based human-machine interaction driven by a significant convergence in the methods and techniques employed. However, the quantity of training data required to improve state-of-the-art systems seems to be growing exponentially and performance appears to be asymptotic to a level that may be inadequate for many real-world applications. This suggests that there may be a fundamental flaw in the underlying architecture of contemporary systems, as well as a failure to capitalize on the combinatorial properties of human spoken language. This paper addresses these issues and presents a novel architecture for speech-based human-machine interaction inspired by recent findings in the neurobiology of living systems. Called PRESENCE-"PREdictive SENsorimotor Control and Emulation" - this new architecture blurs the distinction between the core components of a traditional spoken language dialogue system and instead focuses on a recursive hierarchical feedback control structure. Cooperative and communicative behavior emerges as a by-product of an architecture that is founded on a model of interaction in which the system has in mind the needs and intentions of a user and a user has in mind the needs and intentions of the system