Towards an introduction to computational semiotics

Abstract

Computational semiotics is a quite new field of research, which emerged from advanced studies on artificial intelligence and intelligent systems. It is an alternative to the mainstream approaches - those based either on cognitivism or on biologically inspired techniques. Instead, computational semiotics seeks its inspiration on semiotics, a tradition on the philosophy of mind dealing with the concepts of representation and communication from a more technical perspective. The whole story besides this new field of research is usually unknown from many researchers working on the field of intelligent systems. This story started during the 1970's, where two main precursors first published works relating semiotics to intelligent systems development, almost at the same time in Russia and in the U.S. These pioneering studies were performed by Dmitri Pospelov in Russia and Eugene Pendergraft in U.S. Despite promising research results, for diverse reasons they stayed ignored from the mainstream in artificial intelligence for about 25 years. However, around 1995 they were rediscovered, motivating the development of this new paradigm of research. The goal of this paper is to briefly review the main contributions in this area.