Jean-Louis Dessalles

Institut Mines-Télécom | telecom-sudparis.eu · Télécom ParisTech

Heroes are people who perform costly altruistic acts. Few people turn out to be heroes, but most people spontaneously honor heroes overtly by commenting, applauding, or enthusiastically celebrating their deeds. This behavior seems odd from an individual fitness optimization perspective. The best strategy should be to rely on others to invest time a...

The paper presents the main characteristics and a preliminary implementation of a novel computational framework named CompLog. Inspired by probabilistic programming systems like ProbLog, CompLog builds upon the inferential mechanisms proposed by Simplicity Theory, relying on the computation of two Kolmogorov complexities (here implemented as min-pa...

The paper presents the main characteristics and a preliminary implementation of a novel computational framework named CompLog. Inspired by probabilistic programming systems like ProbLog, CompLog builds upon the inferential mechanisms proposed by Simplicity Theory, relying on the computation of two Kolmogorov complexities (here implemented as min-pa...

Smart homes are Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) where multiple devices and controllers cooperate to achieve high-level goals. Causal knowledge on relations between system entities is essential for enabling system self-adaption to dynamic changes. As house configurations are diverse, this knowledge is difficult to obtain. In previous work, we proposed...

To demonstrate their commitment, for instance during wartime, members of a group will sometimes all engage in the same ruinous display. Such uniform, high-cost signals are hard to reconcile with standard models of signaling. For signals to be stable, they should honestly inform their audience; yet, uniform signals are trivially uninformative. To ex...

To demonstrate their commitment, for instance during wartime, members of a group will sometimes all engage in a ruinous display. Such widespread, high-cost signals are hard to reconcile with standard models of signaling. For signals to be stable, they must honestly inform their audience, and to be honest, their costs need deter least commited indiv...

A great number of methods and of accounts of rationality consider at their foundations some form of Bayesian inference. Yet, Bayes’ rule, because it relies upon probability theory, requires specific axioms to hold (e.g. a measurable space of events). This short document hypothesizes that Bayes’ rule can be seen as a specific instance of a more gene...

A great number of methods and of accounts of rationality consider at their foundations some form of Bayesian inference. Yet, Bayes’ rule, because it relies upon probability theory, requires specific axioms to hold (e.g. a measurable space of events). This short document hypothesizes that Bayes’ rule can be seen as a specific instance of a more gene...

With the increasing number of connected devices, complex systems such as smart homes record a multitude of events of various types, magnitude and characteristics. Current systems struggle to identify which events can be considered more memorable than others. In contrast, humans are able to quickly categorize some events as being more “memorable” th...

With the increasing number of connected devices, complex systems such as smart homes record a multitude of events of various types, magnitude and characteristics. Current systems struggle to identify which events can be considered more memorable than others. In contrast, human are able to quickly categorize some events as being more “memorable” tha...

The Internet of Things (IoT) has been a prominent application for Intelligent Systems in recent years. While the increasing demand for explanations led to many advances in Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI), most solutions focus on systems where a single agent takes all decisions to be explained. However within the IoT context, Cyber-Physica...

Research in Cognitive Science suggests that humans understand and represent knowledge of the world through causal relationships. In addition to observations, they can rely on experimenting and counterfactual reasoning -- i.e. referring to an alternative course of events -- to identify causal relations and explain atypical situations. Different inst...

Analogies are 4-ary relations of the form "A is to B as C is to D". When A, B and C are fixed, we call analogical equation the problem of finding the correct D. A direct applicative domain is Natural Language Processing, in which it has been shown successful on word inflections, such as conjugation or declension. If most approaches rely on the axio...

Les sociétés de chasseurs-cueilleurs n’ont pas d’écoles. Elles accumulent pourtant des savoirs, elles possèdent des langues et des cultures sophistiquées. Si l’on compare notre espèce aux autres primates, tout est différent. Les cultures animales existent, mais elles sont si restreintes qu’elles sont longtemps passées inaperçues aux yeux des étholo...

Human beings are talkative. What advantage did their ancestors find in communicating so much? Numerous authors consider this advantage to be “obvious” and “enormous”. If so, the problem of the evolutionary emergence of language amounts to explaining why none of the other primate species evolved anything even remotely similar to language. I propose...

Autonomic computing systems maintain high-level goals by continuously adapting to a changing environment, yet their internal operations have no comprehensible meaning to humans. This paper proposes a dialogue management system based on a communication interface acting as a bridge between subsymbolic and symbolic knowledge representation levels. The...

A referring expression (RE) is a description that identifies a set of instances unambiguously. Mining REs from data finds applications in natural language generation, algorithmic journalism, and data maintenance. Since there may exist multiple REs for a given set of entities, it is common to focus on the most intuitive ones, i.e., the most concise...

Deep learning and other similar machine learning techniques have a huge advantage over other AI methods: they do function when applied to real-world data, ideally from scratch, without human intervention. However, they have several shortcomings that mere quantitative progress is unlikely to overcome. The paper analyses these shortcomings as resulti...

Smart homes are, at the time being, more "connected" than "smart". Users should be able to ask smart houses to explain anomalies or surprising behaviours generated by their autonomic controllers. Yet most systems still fail to provide relevant answers to questions as simple as "Why is it hotter than usual ?". We tackle this issue, adopting a hierar...

L’« IA » fait de plus en plus souvent la une des médias. Les mystérieux algorithmes de nos ordinateurs sont champions du monde d’échecs et de go, ils vont conduire nos voitures, traduire automatiquement en n’importe quelle langue, voire imiter nos modes de raisonnement. Hélas, ils ne savent même pas qu’ils sont intelligents. Pour le dire plus clai...

A language might be analog or digital, holistic or combinatory, referential, arbitrary, compositional and it may have a syntax. The properties of ecosystemic code appear to be analog: predation, symbiosis, parasitism and spatial presence are essentially gradual in nature, when viewed from the level of the populations. The codes are holistic, and ea...

This chapter relies on some recent theoretical developments in algorithmic information theory that allow to propose a common framework to describe the various situations in which the word "information" occurred spontaneously. Useful information seems to float between two extremes: extreme redundancy, as in a repetitive sequence, and extreme disorde...

A domain of biology in which information plays a leading role, and which deserves a close study in its own right, is genetics. This chapter considers how this field is related to information, language, code and the specific features of that relationship. Molecular biology devotes particular attention to information that is transmitted from generati...

There are several ways in which Homo sapiens stand out from other species. This chapter deals with Homo sapiens considered as information specialists. Human communication is "monstrous" in several aspects, not only by the prohibitive amount of time devoted to it. Communication has requisitioned our memory and our intelligence. Syntax does not owe i...

This chapter explains how the concept of information opens up new avenues to improve our still‐limited understanding of ecosystems. It defends the idea that the ecosystem is a perennial system precisely because of its information flows and the encodings that sustain it. An ecosystem functions in such a way that the biocoenosis cannot exist without...

Self-sacrifice can be modeled as a costly social signal carried to the ultimate extreme. Such signaling may be evolutionarily stable if social status is, in part, inherited.

Several computational methods have been proposed to evaluate the relevance of an instantiated cause to an observed consequence. The paper reports on an experiment to investigate the adequacy of some of these methods as descriptors of human judgments about causal relevance.

Analogical reasoning is a cognitively fundamental way of reasoning by comparing two pairs of elements. Several computational approaches are proposed to efficiently solve analogies: among them, a large number of practical methods rely on either a parallelogram representation of the analogy or, equivalently, a model of proportional analogy. In this p...

This paper provides an updated formalization of the operation of contrast, and shows that, by applying it on conceptual spaces, membership functions to categories as e.g. those captured by adjectives or directional relationships emerge as a natural by-product. Because the outcome of contrast depends not only on the objects contrasted (a target and...

We remember a small proportion of our experiences as events. Are these events selected because they are useful and can be proven true, or rather because they are unexpected?

Human beings are talkative. What advantage did their ancestors find in communicating so much? Numerous authors consider this advantage to be "obvious" and "enormous". If so, the problem of the evolutionary emergence of language amounts to explaining why none of the other primate species evolved anything even remotely similar to language. What I pro...

Human beings are talkative. What advantage did their ancestors find in communicating so much? Numerous authors consider this advantage to be "obvious" and "enormous". If so, the problem of the evolutionary emergence of language amounts to explaining why none of the other primate species evolved anything even remotely similar to language. What I pro...

Responsibility, as referred to in everyday life, as explored in moral philosophy and debated in jurisprudence, is a multiform, ill-defined but inescapable notion for reasoning about actions. Its presence in all social constructs suggests the existence of an underlying cognitive base. Following this hypothesis, and building upon simplicity theory, t...

Within the general objective of conceiving a cognitive architecture for image interpretation able to generate outputs relevant to several target user profiles, the paper elaborates on a set of operations that should be provided by a cognitive space to guarantee the generation of relevant descriptions. First, it attempts to define a working definiti...

People avoid changing subject abruptly during conversation. There are reasons to think that this constraint is more than a social convention and is deeply rooted in our cognition. We show here that the phenomenon of topic connectedness is an expected consequence of the maximization of unexpectedness and that it is predicted by Simplicity Theory.

Analogical reasoning is a central problem both for human cognition and for artificial learning. Many aspects of this problem remain unsolved, though, and analogical reasoning is still a difficult task for machines. In this paper, we consider the problem of analogical reasoning and assume that the relevance of a solution can be measured by the compl...

Whereas a large number of machine learning methods focus on offline learning over a single batch of data called training data set, the increasing number of automatically generated data leads to the emergence of new issues that offline learning cannot cope with. Incremental learning designates online learning of a model from streaming data. In non-s...

Acceptable arguments must be logically relevant. This paper describes an attempt to retro-engineer the human argumentative competence. The aim is to produce a minimal cognitive procedure that generates logically relevant arguments at the right time. Such a procedure is proposed as a proof of principle. It relies on a very small number of operations...

We propose to apply Simplicity Theory (ST) to model interest in creative situations. ST has been designed to describe and predict interest in communication. Here we use ST to derive a decision rule that we apply to a simplified version of a creative game, the Poietic Generator. The decision rule produces what can be regarded as an elementary form o...

Et si certaines entités vivantes n’étaient pas matérielles ? Potentiellement éternelles, en lutte pour la survie, elles évoluent. Elles constituent ce qui unit les êtres à travers le temps. Elles sont le fil de la vie. Ces entités vivantes immatérielles sont des informations. Elles existent à travers nous, dans nos gènes, dans notre culture, dans...

Human conversation has a particular structure that bears no resemblance with any other known communication system. People's spontaneous talking comes in two forms: narratives and collective argumentative reasoning. This characteristic conversational structure cannot be fortuitous. Conversation is a costly behaviour, if only by the time and energy i...

The evolutionary emergence of meaning According to Darwin, the difference in mind between humans and higher animals is one of degree and not of kind. The study of human cognitive competences however reveals several operations that make sense only in relation to language. For instance, the way we combine meanings or form predicates have no evident b...

According to Darwin, the difference in mind between humans and higher animals is one of degree and not of kind. The study of human cognitive competences however reveals several operations that make sense only in relation to language. For instance, the way we combine meanings or form predicates have no evident behavioural role, except that they are...

p>Acceptable arguments must be logically relevant. This paper describes an attempt to retro-engineer the human argumentative competence. The aim is to produce a minimal cognitive procedure that generates logically relevant arguments at the right time. Such a procedure is proposed as a proof of principle. It relies on a very small number of operatio...

Human beings do assess probabilities. Their judgments are however sometimes at odds with probability theory. One possibility is that human cognition is imperfect or flawed in the probability domain, showing biases and errors. Another possibility, that we explore here, is that human probability judgments do not rely on a weak version of probability...

Why is a red face not really red? How do we decide that this book is a textbook or not? Conceptual spaces provide the medium on which these computations are performed, but an additional operation is needed: Contrast. By contrasting a reddish face with a prototypical face, one gets a prototypical ‘red’. By contrasting this book with a prototypical t...

p>Why is a red face not really red? How do we decide that this book is a textbook or not? Conceptual spaces provide the medium on which these computations are performed, but an additional operation is needed: Contrast. By contrasting a reddish face with a prototypical face, one gets a prototypical ‘red’. By contrasting this book with a prototypical...

Unexpectedness is a major factor controlling interest in narratives. Emotions, for instance, are felt intensely if they are associated with unexpected events. The problem with generating unexpected situations is that either characters, or the whole story, are at risk of being no longer believable. This issue is one of the main problems that make st...

Human beings devote a considerable share of their time, maybe one third of the day (Mehl & Pennebaker 2003:866), to sharing information with conspecifics about often futile but sometimes consequential topics. This behavior is unique in nature. How can we account for the existence of honest communication in a Darwinian world where individuals are in...

In this work, we address the question of generating understandable narratives using a cognitive approach. The requirements of cognitive plausibility are presented. Then an abduction-based cognitive model of the human deliberative reasoning ability is presented. We believe that implementing such a procedure in a narrative context to generate plans w...

Though human beings are experts in the determination of aspectual relations, current models of Aspect lack principled parsimony. We show that even on a limited segment of language, determining aspectual interpretations seems to require much ad hoc information. Our suggestion is to give parsimony first priority. The model we present in this paper is...

What is language good for? For a long time, the question has remained not only unanswered, but not even asked. The classic ‘reason’ invoked to avoid the issue was that language benefited the species as a whole. This way of reasoning is simply wrong (Williams 1966). If information has any value, it is in the interest of no one to give it for free. A...

This study is an attempt to determine how much individuals should invest in social communication, depending on the type of relationships they may form. Two simple models of social relationships are considered. In both models, individuals emit costly signals to advertise their "quality" as potential friends. Relationships are asymmetrical or symmetr...

p>In a Darwinian world, providing honest information to competitors is, at face value, a losing strategy. If information is valuable, no one should give it for free, and if it has no value, no one should pay attention to it. This Darwinian principle is the main reason why most animal species don’t communicate usefully about their environment. There...

p>What is language good for? For a long time, the question has remained not only unanswered, but not even asked. The classic ‘reason’ invoked to avoid the issue was that language benefited the species as a whole. This way of reasoning is simply wrong (Williams 1966). If information has any value, it is in the interest of no one to give it for free....

The challenge of narrative automatic generation is to produce not only coherent, but interesting stories. This study considers the problem within the Simplicity Theory framework. According to this theory, interesting situations must be unexpectedly simple, either because they should have required complex circumstances to be produced, or because the...

The human mind is known to be sensitive to complexity. For instance, the visual system reconstructs hidden parts of objects following a principle of maximum simplicity. We suggest here that higher cognitive processes, such as the selection of relevant situations, are sensitive to variations of complexity. Situations are relevant to human beings whe...

Several studies have highlighted the combined role of emotions and reasoning in the determination of judgments about morality. Here we explore the influence of Kolmogorov complexity in the determination, not only of moral judgment, but also of the associated narrative interest. We designed an experiment to test the predictions of our complexity-bas...

Giving away relevant information for free seems to be a loosing strategy. Human beings devote time and energy in providing information to conspecifics. Human beings build their social network based on excellence in that activity. Giving away relevant information is a winning strategy if it reveals some crucial quality.

Human language is still an embarrassment for evolutionary theory, as the speaker's benefit remains unclear. The willingness to communicate information is shown here to be an evolutionary stable strategy (ESS), even if acquiring original information from the environment involves significant cost and communicating it provides no material benefit to a...

Two different conceptions of emergence are reconciled as two instances of the phenomenon of detection. In the process of comparing these two conceptions, we find that the notions of complexity and detection allow us to form a unified definition of emergence that clearly delineates the role of the observer.

A number of concepts are included in the term 'consciousness'. We choose to concentrate here on phenomenal consciousness, the process through which we are able to experience aspects of our environment or of our physical state. We probably share this aspect of consciousness with many animals which, like us, feel pain or pleasure and experience colou...

Near-miss experiences are one of the main sources of intense emotions. Despite people's consistency when judging near-miss situations and when communicating about them, there is no integrated theoretical account of the phenomenon. In particular, individuals' reaction to near-miss situations is not correctly predicted by rationality-based or probabi...

The feeling of good or bad luck occurs whenever there is an emotion contrast between an event and an easily accessible counterfactual alternative. This study suggests that cognitive simplicity plays a key role in the human ability to experience good and bad luck after the occurrence of an event.

Though the ability of human beings to deal with probabilities has been put into question, the assessment of rarity is a crucial competence underlying much of human decision-making and is pervasive in spontaneous narrative behaviour. This paper proposes a new model of rarity and randomness assessment, designed to be cognitively plausible. Intuitive...

Episodic memory is certainly a unique endowment, but its primary purpose is something other than to provide raw material for creative synthesis of future scenarios. Remembered episodes are exactly those which are worth telling. The function of episodic memory, in our view, is to accumulate stories that are relevant to recount in conversation.

Selection through iterated learning explains no more than other non-functional accounts, such as universal grammar, why language is so well-designed for communicative efficiency. It does not predict several distinctive features of language like central embedding, large lexicons or the lack of iconicity, that seem to serve communication purposes at...

Résumé : Nous proposons l'esquisse d'un modèle de calcul des relations temporelles dans le langage. Ce modèle cherche à satisfaire une contrainte de minimalisme cognitif, de manière à assurer une économie dans le calcul, dans la mémoire et dans les structures lors de l'analyse des informations temporelles contenues dans les énoncés. L'objectif est,...

Individuals have an intuitive perception of what makes a good coincidence. Though the sensitivity to coincidences has often been presented as resulting from an erroneous assessment of probability, it appears to be a genuine competence, based on non-trivial computations. The model presented here suggests that coincidences occur when subjects perceiv...

Where does human language come from? The 'greatest problem in science', according to Bickerton (2009), remains a mystery. This new volume offers a partial but important map of current ideas on the problem. The book is stimulating because of the issues it raises and surprising in the issues it ignores. The book is organized as a debate around the of...

The biological function of human reasoning abilities cannot be to improve shared knowledge. This is at best a side effect. A more plausible function of argumentation, and thus of reasoning, is to advertise one's ability to detect lies and errors. Such selfish behavior is closer to what we should expect from a naturally selected competence.

Commonsense wisdom dictates that mutual understanding grows with cognitive harmony. Communication seems impossible between people who do not share values, beliefs and concerns. If carried to the extreme, however, this statement neglects the fact that the formation of social bonds crucially depends on the expression of cognitive dissonance.

This study is an attempt to measure the variations of interest aroused by conversational narratives when definite dimensions of the reported events are manipulated. The results are com-pared with the predictions of the Complexity Drop Theory, which states that events are more interesting when they appear simpler, in the Kolmogorov sense, than antic...