Conversational robots

Deb Roy, Kai-Yuh Hsiao, Nikolaos Mavridis
2003 Proceedings of the HLT-NAACL 2003 workshop on Learning word meaning from non-linguistic data -   unpublished
How can we build robots that engage in fluid spoken conversations with people, moving beyond canned responses to words and towards actually understanding? As a step towards addressing this question, we introduce a robotic architecture that provides a basis for grounding word meanings. The architecture provides perceptual, procedural, and affordance representations for grounding words. A perceptuallycoupled on-line simulator enables sensorymotor representations that can shift points of view.
more » ... together, we show that this architecture provides a rich set of data structures and procedures that provide the foundations for grounding the meaning of certain classes of words. 1 We acknowledge that the words in this example, like most words, have numerous additional connotations that are not captured by the representations that we have suggested. For example, words such as touch, heavy and blue can be used metaphorically to refer to emotional actions and states. Things are not always physical perceivable objects, my usually indicates possession, and so forth. Barwise and Perry use the phrase "efficiency of language" to highlight the situation-dependent reusability of words and utterances (Barwise and Perry, 1983) . However, for
doi:10.3115/1119212.1119222 fatcat:mb2l7qwvbfdxdbctatmad7baqm