Semantic Goals for Communication

Massachusetts Institute Of Technology, Cambridge MA

Investigators

Abstract

Semantic Goals for Communication Madhu Sudan MIT CSAIL This project initiates the study of semantic issues underlying communication: How do two communicating parties resolve potential misunderstandings about the {\em interpretation} of the information (bits) that they are exchanging? The principal objective of this project is to produce a series of mathematical definitions capturing the underlying problem. Furthermore the project seeks to discover paradigms that lead to robust communication, without misunderstanding. The principal insight at the core of this project is that each communicating player has selfish goals that describe what it would expect from the communication with the other players. Such goals are non-trivial (can not be achieved by one player alone), and verifiable by the player. The project explores the possibility of using these verifiable goals to enable mutual understanding. Specifically, it uses research from the last several decades in complexity theory on interactive proofs and program checking to suggest scenarios in which communicating players could start without any prior common background and start to converge towards a common understanding, thereby establishing a theory of understanding. The broader impact of this project would be to enable a mathematical approach to understanding human communication and development of language, as also to guide the design of robust protocols for inter-computer communication.