The empirical semantics approach to communication structure learning and usage: Individualistic vs. systemic views

In open systems of artificial agents, the meaning of communication in part emerges from ongoing interaction processes. In this paper, we present the empirical semantics approach to inductive derivation of communication semantics that can be used to derive this emergent semantics of communication from observations. The approach comes in two complementary variants: One uses social systems theory, focusing on system expectation structures and global utility maximisation, and the other is based on symbolic interactionism, focusing on the viewpoint and utility maximisation of the individual agent. Both these frameworks make use of the insight that the most general meaning of agent utterances lies in their expectable consequences in terms of observable events, and thus they strongly demarcate themselves from traditional approaches to the semantics and pragmatics of agent communication languages.