Symbol Grounding, Turing Testing and Robot Talking

Harnad, S; Blondin-Massé; A, St-Louis, B; Chicoisne, G; Gargouri, Y; & Picard, O. RoadMap Workshop on Action and Language Integration Rome, 22-24 September 2008.

Associations vs. Propositions

The expressive power of natural language The Church/Turing Thesis about the

expressive power of computation The performance power of human

cognition The Turing Test Toy models and underdetermination

Pantomime vs. Propositions

Doing, Showing and Telling Truth values (T & F) Categories and category acquisition:

Learning to do the right thing with the right kind of thing

Sensorimotor affordances Naming and describing/defining/explaining

Symbol Grounding

Language has limitless expressive power, but it cannot be words all the way down

Words need to be grounded in sensorimotor categorization capacity

Wittgenstein’s “meaning is use” is empty: how to design a system that can use words as humans can?

Design a system that can pass the Turinf Test

Grounding Dictionary Meaning

(Switch to PDFs….) Based on the MRC Psycholinguistic

Database that the words in our grounding kernel are significantly more concrete and are acquired at a significantly earlier age than the words in the rest of the dictionary

ERPS During Sensorimotor Category Learning

(Switch to PDFs….) Based on how prior ERP findings, these results

suggest: (1) The positivity reflects the subject’s confidence in categorizing the stimuli, which depends on difficulty and improves (and accelerates) with practice. (2) The negative peak reflects improved detection of the category invariants with practice, with reduced efficiency on incorrect trials.