Measuring the understanding between two agents through concept similarity

Two agents previously unknown to each other cannot communicate by exchanging concepts (nodes of their own ontology): they need to use a common communication language. If they do not use a standard protocol, most likely they use a natural language. The ambiguities of it, and the different concepts the agents possess, give rise to imperfect understanding among them: How closely concepts in ontology O A map 1 1 O A and O B are the ontologies of agents A (the talker or sender) and B (the listener), in the rest of the paper. to which of O B? Can we measure these mismatches? Given a concept from ontology O A, a method is provided to find the most similar concept in O B, and to measure the similarity between both concepts. The paper also gives an algorithm to gauge du(A, B), the degree of understanding that agent A has about the ontology of B. The procedures use word comparison, since no agent (except the Very Wise Creature, VWC) can measure du directly. Examples are given.