How to Prevent War Resulting from Cross-Cultural Miscommunication?

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Cross-cultural miscommunication can derail negotiations, incite hostile discourse – even lead to war. The likelihood of communicative failure increases dramatically where significant social, cultural, or ideological differences exist.

The U.S. Defense Advanced Research and Projects Agency (DARPA) is working on Artificial Intelligence (AI)-enabled interpreters to aid in military operations.

Unlike the human cultural interpreters who enable U.S. forces today, current AI-enabled systems are incapable of accurately analyzing cross-cultural communication or providing useful assistance beyond basic machine translation. While there have been significant advances made in machine learning and multimedia analysis, a number of critical deficiencies in these systems still remain.

“To support users engaged in cross-cultural dialogue, AI-enabled systems need to go beyond providing language translation – they need to leverage deep social and cultural understanding to assist communication,” said Dr. William Corvey, a program manager in DARPA’s Information Innovation Office (I2O). “Moving AI from a tool to a partner in this capacity will require significant advances in our machines’ ability to discover and interpret sociocultural factors, recognize emotions, detect shifts in communication styles, and provide dialogue assistance when miscommunications seem imminent – all in real-time.”

To assist negotiations and aid critical interactions, DARPA developed the Computational Cultural Understanding (CCU) program. The goal of CCU is to create a cross-cultural language understanding service to improve a DoD operator’s situational awareness and ability to effectively interact with diverse international audiences. The program seeks to develop natural language processing (NLP) technologies that recognize, adapt to, and recommend how to operate within the emotional, social, and cultural norms that differ across societies, languages, and communities.

To help promote truly effective cross-cultural interaction, CCU technologies must be able to not only detect potential misunderstandings but also generate alternative socioculturally-appropriate responses. As such, the second research area in CCU will focus on the development of a dialogue assistance service. The target service will automate the detection of sociocultural context, including aspects related to identity and group affinity, and leverage the outputs of the first research area in order to follow ongoing conversations, detect misunderstandings in real-time, and provide dialogue assistance to human operators, according to defenseworld.net.