Actively Building Context (ABC): A Model for Context- Aware Communication

Effective communication is important in nearly all aspects of our lives, and it is especially crucial for military missions. Unfortunately, communication failures are common. The effects of these range from confusion, frustration, and delay to consequential losses of assets and lives. Context misalignment is a common factor in communication failures. It may be possible to avoid those failures and their negative impacts, and indeed to improve mission performance, through focused research on context-aware communications. Thus, the goal of the current line of research is to enhance operational communication by improving contextual overlap among both human and machine communicators in military environments. We seek to do this by developing a context-aware machine agent capable of dynamically determining the relative importance of information as it pertains to the current situation (i.e., identifying context) in order to accomplish one or more of the following: (a) use context to inform its own comprehension and language production processes, (b) aid humans in identifying and tracking context which may be relevant to a communication, and (c) aid humans in detecting and resolving risks for miscommunication.