Sheepdogs, Swarms, And Semantics: Better Human-AI Communication

How can AI and humans communicate better? According to a group of researchers, the answer lies in an Aboriginal language.

In their article "JSwarm: A Jingulu-Inspired Human-AI-Teaming Language for Context-Aware Swarm Guidance" (Abbass et al., Front. Phys., 14 July 2022, Sec. Interdisciplinary Physics), the researchers propose a language ("JSwarm") for communication between humans and an AI agent based on Jingulu, a language spoken by the Jingili people of Australia's Northern Territory .

Jingulu has a number of properties which make it ideal for bridging the gap between humans and AI. Firstly, it has a much freer word order than English, which requires sentences to be written using the "subject-verb-order" structure. (For example, "The attorney filed the patent application" is clear to an English speaker, whereas "filed the attorney the patent application" is not.) As a result, the meaning of a sentence in JSwarm is more robust to changes in word order.