Learning Communicative Meanings of Utterances by Robots

  • Authors:
  • Ryo Taguchi;Naoto Iwahashi;Tsuneo Nitta

  • Affiliations:
  • Nagoya Institute of Technology, Nagoya, Japan 466-8555;National Institute of Information and Communications Technology, and Advanced Telecommunications Research Institute International, Kyoto, Japan 619-0288;Toyohashi University of Technology, Toyohashi-city, Japan 441-8580

  • Venue:
  • New Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence
  • Year:
  • 2009

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Abstract

This paper describes a computational mechanism that enables a robot to return suitable utterances to a human or perform actions by learning the meanings of interrogative words, such as "what" and "which." Previous studies of language acquisition by robots have proposed methods to learn words, such as "box" and "blue," that indicate objects or events in the world. However, the robots could not learn and understand interrogative words by those methods because the words do not directly indicate objects or events. The meanings of those words are grounded in communication and stimulate specific responses by a listener. These are called communicative meanings. Our proposed method learns the relationship between human utterances and robot responses that have communicative meanings on the basis of a graphical model of the human-robot interaction.