Research

Thinking and Creativity

Language is one of the characteristics of human beings and computers. But one of the major differences of human language from computer language is its flexible “use”. If even one character is different in a computer language, an error will occur, but the words written and spoken by humans are full of mistakes from the perspective of a computer. Still, we use words so that nothing happens. Behind it, not only is human language comprehension robust to noise, but there are also human-specific thinking abilities such as analogy, conceptual metaphor, and abduction that are not present in modern machines.

Multimodal Dialogue

Human dialogue and interaction are not limited to words. We rely so much on words that they tend to appear to be at the center of them, but it may not really be at the center. It is known that there are thousands of languages ​​used by humankind, and there are many different types of vocabulary, grammar, and part of speech (nouns, verbs, etc.), but the way of dialogue is almost the same for humankind in contrast to the difference in language.

Metaverse and Conversational Interaction

In the Metaverse (social VR), which has been in the limelight in recent years, there is a tendency to focus on various experiences that cannot be done in reality, but it is no exaggeration to say that the most important activity that actually takes place is communication between participants, that is, dialogue. A feature and strength of conversational interaction in the Metaverse is the physicality, or embodiment, of each participant’s avatar. On the other hand,

Cooperative Interaction

One of the major characteristics of human dialogue is that it is based on close cooperation with each other. Cooperation here broadly includes phenomena generally called synchronization, coordination, and collaboration. In order for machines to be cooperative with humans, it is necessary to learn from humans how cooperative interactions should be. From the perspectives of psychology [1], mathematical cognitive modeling [2], sociolinguistics [3], etc., we are conducting basic research on the universal characteristics of human cooperation and the appearance of cooperation in dialogue.