Next: Learning Outcomes Up: Human Communication HC1 10-11 Previous: 

Background

Communication between agents, both human and computational, involves a number of activities including the generation of the communication, conveying it to some other agent, interpretation of responses from and interactions with the other agent, understanding of the communication by the other agent, and internalisation of the knowledge acquired from the communication for use in the future. This module aims to convey:

  1. knowledge of the various activities involved in communication, and some of the methods used, through consideration of a small number of example systems;
  2. an understanding of the difficulties and of what is feasible today and in the future.
This course will give a basic insight into the cognitive events occurring in communication and show that everyday communication is not as simple as it at first seems, but that it relies on a complicated set of rules which we all use automatically, which only become evident when communication breakdowns occur.

Participants of this course will, for example, see why humour can be a good example of the intentional use of language ambiguity; how predefined rules, knowledge of the listener and world knowledge can all contribute to predicting what will happen next in an interaction; and how both failures in language and communication difficulties can help us in developing better cognitive models of communication.


Helen Pain
8/Jan/11


Home : Teaching : Courses : Hc1 

Informatics Forum, 10 Crichton Street, Edinburgh, EH8 9AB, Scotland, UK
Tel: +44 131 651 5661, Fax: +44 131 651 1426, E-mail: school-office@inf.ed.ac.uk
Please contact our webadmin with any comments or corrections. Logging and Cookies
Unless explicitly stated otherwise, all material is copyright © The University of Edinburgh