AIBO’s First Words
Question: What are the mechanisms needed to learn the meaning of new words in natural social contexts? How are the social regulation mechanisms involved in language learning? How can one draw the attention of a robot towards particular aspects of their environment? What are the interactions between acquisition mechanisms and language evolution?
We investigate the mechanisms that enable humans and robots to learn new words and to use them in appropriate situations. We have built a number of robotic and computational experiments studying the mechanisms of concept formation, joint attention, social coordination and language games, and articulating the roles of learning, physical and environmental biases in language acquisition. The unifying theme of all these experiments is development: we explore the hypothesis that language can only be acquired through the progressive structuring of the sensorimotor and social experience. These experiments are described in the papers below.
Interaction between an AIBO and its human trainer in the
AIBO’s First Words experiment.
Participants: Luc Steels, Masahiro Fujita [Sony DCL Tokyo], Frédéric Kaplan, Angus McIntyre, and Pierre-Yves Oudeyer
Tags: Developmental Robotics, Language
References
Talking AIBO : First experimentation of verbal interactions with an autonomous four-legged robot. In Nijholt, A. and Heylen, D. and Jokinen, K., editor, Learning to Behave: Interacting agents CELE-TWENTE Workshop on Language Technology, pages 57-63, October 2000.
Construction sociale du sens. In Guillot, A. and Dauce,E., editor, Approche dynamique de la cognition, Traite des sciences cognitives , pages 201-217, Hermes Science Publications. 2002.
How Phonological Structures Can Be Culturally Selected for Learnability. Adaptive Behavior, 13(4):269-280 2005.
Discovering Communication. Connection Science, 18(2):189-206 2006.
Language Evolution as a Darwinian Process: Computational Studies. Cognitive Processing, 8(1):21-35 2007.
AIBO's first words: The social learning of language and meaning. Evolution of Communication, 4(1):3-32 2000.
