Mine Over Matter: Gaming Google 'Quick, Draw!' Data to Explore Theory of Mind in Autism

Linguistic coordination depends upon some extent of interpretable and resolvable implicit communication as pertinent to any given act delivered or read to carry communicative intent. Implicit communication may bear various forms, from denotative versus connotative phrasal meaning representations to evaluations of holistic or stepwise behaviors (whether among humans or among nodes of a system more broadly) in determination of implicit participation and cooperation. This thesis proceeds in documenting how various communicative channels serve to inform accommodative design receptive to unconventional indicators of participation. It holistically encompasses such explorations through theories of silence and current work in conversational database querying, but the focus in particular is upon research for proof-of-concept game design attending to theory of mind presentations in children with autism spectrum disorder. This project is not only about informing accommodative design, but also about informing the \textit{means} of informing accommodative design; as such, user study and expert feedback sessions not only serve the design process, but the design of the design process. Confronting similar processes and problems whether crafting a working set of linguistic definitions or crafting expectations for free-form querying with small data, the theory-of-mind project is a unifying thread for the whole as a matter of finding, or building, the structures necessary for open-ended communicative liberty. Working to expand technological inclusivity via assumed cooperation, this project and its adjuncts explore how far the limits may be taken of what a system or dataset may offer the user and vice versa for as long as communicative ``benefit of the doubt'' is granted and sustained