The origins of syntax in visually grounded robotic agents

摘要

The paper proposes a set of principles and a general architecture that may explain how language and meaning may originate and complexify in a group of physically grounded distributed agents. An experimental setup is introduced for concretising and validating specific mechanisms based on these principles. The setup consists of two robotic heads that watch a scene in which a robot moves around in its ecosystem. The first results from experiments showing the emergence of distinctions, of a lexicon, and of primitive syntactic structures are reported. 1 Introduction Artificial Intelligence research has made remarkable progress the last decades by showing how operations over symbolic models may explain various aspects of intelligent behavior, such as planning, problem solving, natural language processing, etc. However, the problem of the origin of these symbolic models has so far not been adequately addressed. Most of the time it is the programmer who designs formalisms and datastructures, ...