Communication cycle

Introduction

Observation: most of the (declarative) knowledge people acquire in their youth and apply in their ordinary life is not devised by themselves but fabricated by wise men in past and present. This knowledge is transferred by means of communication.The purpose of CommunSENS is to build a knowledge engine that can be a node in this communication cycle.A nice example of knowledge transfer by means of communication is given in figure 1.1. At the start of the dialog both children have a certain knowledge state. When the communication cycle stops, their knowledge state has changed. Janneke knows that Jip has four uncles. Jip knows that Janneke has an uncle with a beard.It is important to note that the knowledge state of the children is fully scalable. To put it into the words of a computer programmer: the knowledge is added at run-time, without stopping and rebuilding the system or generating additional code.

The classic physiology of the communication cycle.

The success of the species homo sapiens is caused by its ability to accumulate knowledge by means of the communication cycle. This cycle can be associated with certain parts in the human brain: the hardware. The next figure gives a general idea of these relevant parts.

The cycle starts with a knowledge carrier: verbal or written utterances. In the case of Jip and Janneke such an utterance is for example the sentence: 'I have an uncle'. This sentence reaches Jip's ear and is transferred to an area in the brain called Wernicke's area. In that area the individual words of the sentence are recognized. In the same area the structure of the utterance is decoded. For example, in the utterance 'I have four uncles' it is important to know that 'four' relates to 'uncles' and not to 'have'. The operation in which words get the right position is called parsing. After parsing it is possible to store the contents of the utterance as symbolic knowledge somewhere in the brain.
When Jip has stored the information about Janneke's uncle he can add his own information to it. Somewhere in Jip's brain there is symbolic information stored about four uncles. This symbolic information is retrieved and processed in Broca's area. There it is put into words (naming). Next these words are structured in a sentence (phrasing). After that, a signal is given to the motor cortex in order to articulate the utterance: 'I have four of them. Four uncles'. This triggers the next stage in the communication cycle.

Up till now we discussed the communication between 2 persons at the same time. However, knowledge transfer is not limited to the present but it also links to the past. An important part of our knowledge is invented by previous generations. The transfer mechanism is much the same. The main difference is that time restricts the feedback.There is no way that Aristotle could have communicated with Socrates or that we can communicate with Plato. However, the idea's of these men has come to us and they profoundly influence our daily lives.

The architecture of CommunSENS.

The main architecture of CommunSENS is a direct derivative of the classical physiology of the communication cycle. To let the computer be a node in the communication cycle it must be equipped with a parser, a storage medium and a phraser.