Adriana Luntraru, Value-sensitive knowledge evolution, Master's thesis, Université Grenoble Alpes, Grenoble (FR), 2023
Cultural values are cognitive representations of general objectives, such as independence or mastery, that people use to distinguish whether something is "good" or "bad". More specifically, people may use their values to evaluate alternatives and pick the most compatible one. Cultural values have been previously used in artificial societies of agents with the purpose of replicating and predicting human behavior. However, to the best of our knowledge, they have never been used in the context of cultural knowledge evolution. We consider cooperating agents which adapt their individually learned ontologies by interacting with each other to agree. When two agents disagree during an interaction, one of them needs to adapt its ontology. We use the cultural values of independence, novelty, authority and mastery to influence the choice of which agent adapts in a population of agents sharing the same values. We investigate the effects the choice of cultural values has on the knowledge obtained. Our results show that agents do not improve the accuracy of their knowledge without using the mastery value. Under certain conditions, independence causes the agents to converge to successful interactions faster, and novelty increases knowledge diversity, but both effects come with a large reduction in accuracy. We however did not find any significant effects of authority.