Cultural knowledge evolution considers how agents evolve their knowledge through communicating with each others. However, these agents evolve within distinct populations. What should happen when two populations encounter?
Cultural evolution is the application of evolution theory to culture. It has been applied to various aspects of our life in societies: from customs to languages, from boat shapes to company structures [Messoudi, 2011].
Cultural knowledge evolution deals with the evolution of knowledge representation in a group of computer agents. For that purpose, cooperating agents adapt their knowledge to the situations they are exposed to and the feedback they receive from others. After playing this game repeatedly, it is possible to observe the properties of the resulting knowledge. This framework has been considered in the context of evolving natural languages [Steels, 2012]. We have applied it to ontology alignment repair, i.e. the improvement of incorrect alignments [Euzenat, 2017] and ontology evolution [Bourahla et al., 2021]. We have shown that it converges towards successful communication, improves the intrinsic knowledge quality but preserves the diversity of agent knowledge.
The goal of this topic is to investigate how different populations of agents react when they encounter. In this case, a population will be a set of agents that have stabilised some common knowledge (through cultural evolution). The point is to put two or more populations into contact, i.e. agents of different populations start to interact. What can happen? Does the culture of one population is embraced by the other? Do they reach a new different culture than those they had previously?
There are subsidiary questions related to the influence of various parameters on:
In principle, this requires to design a game by which agents evolve knowledge (we have several), to train them (independently) on different examples, and when stabilised to make them interact across populations. It is also possible to consider a contact group: a subset of each population which will interact with the contact group of the other population (and the rest of their population) while agents out of the group only interact within their respective populations. Then the question is whether the culture of the other population percolates in the population out of the contact group.
References:
[Bourahla, 2021] Yasser Bourahla, Manuel Atencia, Jérôme Euzenat, Knowledge improvement and diversity under interaction-driven adaptation of learned ontologies, Proc. 20th AAMAS, London (UK), pp242-250, 2021 https://moex.inria.fr/files/papers/bourahla2021a.pdf
[Euzenat, 2017] Jérôme Euzenat, Communication-driven ontology alignment repair and expansion, in: Proc. 26th International joint conference on artificial intelligence (IJCAI), Melbourne (AU), pp185-191, 2017 https://moex.inria.fr/files/papers/euzenat2017a.pdf
[Mesoudi, 2011] Alex Mesoudi, Cultural evolution: how Darwinian theory can explain human culture and synthesize the social sciences, Chicago university press, Chicago (IL US), 2011 See also: Alex Mesoudi, Andrew Whiten, Kevin Laland, Towards a unfied science of cultural evolution, Behavioral and brain sciences 29(4):329–383, 2006 http://alexmesoudi.com/s/Mesoudi_Whiten_Laland_BBS_2006.pdf
[Steels, 2012] Luc Steels (ed.), Experiments in cultural language evolution, John Benjamins, Amsterdam (NL), 2012
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Master profile: M2, research oriented.
Advisor: Jérôme Euzenat (Jerome:Euzenat#inria:fr)
Team: The work will be carried out in the mOeX team common to INRIA & Université Grenoble Alpes. mOeX is dedicated to study knowledge evolution through adaptation. It gather permanent researchers from the Exmo team which has taken an active part these past 15 years in the development of the semantic web.
Laboratory: LIG.
Place of work: The position is located at INRIA Grenoble Rhône-Alpes, Montbonnot (near Grenoble, France) a main computer science research lab, in a stimulating research environment.
Perspectives: There is possibility to pursue in PhD, related to this topic.
Procedure: Contact us and provide vitæ and possibly motivation letter and references.