2003 IMTA Proceedings - International Military Testing Association

404
Modelling Communication in Negotiation in PSO Context
Prof Dr MSc Jacques Mylle 34
Human Factors & Military Operations Research
Royal Military Academy
B1000 Brussels – Belgium
jacques.mylle@rma.ac.be
Scope
Although people are not conscious of it, negotiation is a very common behaviour. A major
problem that arises often is the lack of a “shared mental model” of the negotiation situation
and which constitutes the core of the negotiation. So, people often leave a lot of information
implicit which in turn leads to misunderstandings.
In other words clear communication depends on the quantity, the quality and the relevance of
the information procured.
Soldiers deployed in a peace support context do not constitute an exception to the above
mentioned observations, on the contrary. Different cultural background, not mastering each
others language, interpreters who do not translate reliably, problems with role perception, etc
are all parameters which make clear communication very difficult and hence negotiation even
more.
Research aim
The aim of our project is to use mathematical and computer tools to unravel and to represent
the logical and informational structure of a dialogue in a given setting. The ultimate goal is to
create a “machine” that can “dialogue” with a living person about a particular object.
On the one hand it will be used to enhance people communicative abilities in a military setting
and on the other hand to train people in negotiation structured way.
It goes without saying that such a project requires the contribution of several fields: among
others psychology, linguistics and computer sciences. In this paper we will look specifically
at the computational linguistic aspects.
Approach
Formally spoken, in linguistics three separate aspects have to be considered, which have to be
implemented in specific modules.
1. The syntactic aspect.
The purpose of this module is to analyze a sentence from a grammatical point of view; i.e.
looking up for the subject, the verb, etc. The output of this first module is necessary as a
structured input for the second module.
2. The semantic aspect.
This module builds a logical representation of the meaning of the sentence starting from
the syntactic structure of it. In most cases these logical representations are underspecified
with respect to certain relationships within and between sentences. Both of these modules
34 In strong collaboration with Nicholas Yates, researcher and specialist in computer linguistics, and Prof Dr
André Helbo, director of the Language Training Centre at the Royal Military Academy.
45 th Annual Conference of the International Military Testing Association
Pensacola, Florida, 3-6 November 2003