Eleventh International School on Mind, Brain and Education

2016 September 7–13

Dynamical Coupling:
From Brain-to-Brain to Social Interaction

Directors of the School: Antonio M. Battro and Kurt W. Fischer
Directors of the Course: Uri Hasson and Thalia Wheatley


Abstract: Toshinori Miyoshi and Yoshiki Niwa
Center for Exploratory Research, Hitachi, Ltd., Japan

Debating Artificial Intelligence
As introduction to presentation about the debating artificial intelligence by Dr. Miyoshi, I would like to explain its positioning and significance in the associated domain, such as support of the human intellectual activity by the information technology, and the language understanding by computers. With respect to the first viewpoint, this debating AI is considered as a primitive but challenging attempt to be an alternative of human intelligent activities. Next, from the viewpoint of language understanding, debating AI is considered as a challenge of language understanding based on the recognition of dynamics of human society, whose movement is largely affected by various kinds of values both positive and/or negative.
Debating is a form of intellectual communications by humans. In debates, a motion is given, and two teams, one supporting, or affirmative side, and the other opposing, or negative side, discuss whether the motion should be adopted or not. We have been developing an artificial intelligence to generate arguments for debates (ACL, 2015). To generate arguments to support or oppose the motion, knowledge on the topic and the ability to judge the positive or negative values of things are required. In the presentation, the author would like to present a method to give knowledge and a standard of value to computers. Based on the given knowledge and the standard of value, the AI understands the motion and the opponents’ arguments, collects evidence, and generates arguments to support or oppose the motion from various viewpoints. Generally, it is difficult to realize a complex human communications such as debates in details by computers, there are some strong points in computers. For example, computers can utilize vast amount of knowledge extracted from a large amount of documents which is difficult to cover for humans. Taking advantage of the strong points, the AI could possibly be applied in the field of education such as supporting idea generation or opinion generation from viewpoints that are not covered by users.

End-to-end Argument Generation System in Debating
Presented at the demonstration session of ACL 2015.
(The 2015 Conference of the Association for Computational Linguistics. Beijing 7/26-31)

Hitachi Developed Basic Artificial Intelligence Technology that Enables Logical Dialogue
(A news release from Hitachi)