What is Needed for a Robot to Acquire Grammar? Some Underlying Primitive Mechanisms for the Synthesis of Linguistic Ability

A robot that can communicate with humans using natural language will have to acquire a grammatical framework. This paper analyses some crucial underlying mechanisms that are needed in the construction of such a framework. The work is inspired by language acquisition in infants, but it also draws on the emergence of language in evolutionary time and in ontogenic (developmental) time. It focuses on issues arising from the use of real language with all its evolutionary baggage, in contrast to an artificial communication system, and describes approaches to addressing these issues. We can deconstruct grammar to derive underlying primitive mechanisms, including serial processing, segmentation, categorization, compositionality, and forward planning. Implementing these mechanisms are necessary preparatory steps to reconstruct a working syntactic/semantic/pragmatic processor which can handle real language. An overview is given of our own initial experiments in which a robot acquires some basic linguistic capacity via interacting with a human.

[1]  Chrystopher L. Nehaniv,et al.  Title of paper : KASPAR – A Minimally Expressive Humanoid Robot for Human-Robot Interaction Research , 2009 .

[2]  F. Pulvermüller.  The Neuroscience of Language , 2003 .

[3]  Luc Steels,et al.  What triggers the emergence of grammar , 2005 .

[4]  Noam Chomsky.  Three Factors in Language Design , 2005, Linguistic Inquiry.

[5]  Pierre-Yves Oudeyer,et al.  Language evolution as a Darwinian process: computational studies , 2007, Cognitive Processing.

[6]  A. Cangelosi.  APPROACHES TO GROUNDING SYMBOLS IN PERCEPTUAL AND SENSORIMOTOR CATEGORIES , 2005 .

[7]  H. Terrace,et al.  Can an ape create a sentence? , 1979, Science.

[8]  R N Aslin,et al.  Statistical Learning by 8-Month-Old Infants , 1996, Science.

[9]  Douglas Biber,et al.  Frequency Analysis of English Vocabulary and Grammar , 1991 .

[10]  Giovanni Soda,et al.  Towards Incremental Parsing of Natural Language Using Recursive Neural Networks , 2003, Applied Intelligence.

[11]  Pierre-Yves Oudeyer,et al.  Self-Organization in the Evolution of Speech , 2006, Oxford Studies in the Evolution of Language.

[12]  Luc Steels,et al.  How Grammar Emerges to Dampen Combinatorial Search in Parsing , 2006, EELC.

[13]  Angelo Cangelosi,et al.  Simulating the Evolution of Language , 2002, Springer London.

[14]  Menno van Zaanen.  Bootstrapping Syntax and Recursion using Alginment-Based Learning , 2000, ICML.

[15]  Chrystopher L. Nehaniv,et al.  A constructivist approach to robot language learning via simulated babbling and holophrase extraction , 2009, 2009 IEEE Symposium on Artificial Life.

[16]  Peter Ford Dominey,et al.  Neurological basis of language and sequential cognition: Evidence from simulation, aphasia, and ERP studies , 2003, Brain and Language.

[17]  Luc Steels,et al.  Scaffolding Language Emergence Using the Autotelic Principle , 2007, 2007 IEEE Symposium on Artificial Life.

[18]  Melissa A. Redford,et al.  Constrained Emergence of Universals and Variation in Syllable Systems , 2001, Language and speech.

[19]  D. Poeppel,et al.  Dorsal and ventral streams: a framework for understanding aspects of the functional anatomy of language , 2004, Cognition.

[20]  Bénédicte de Boysson-Bardies.  How language comes to children , 2009 .

[21]  Denise Brandão de Oliveira e Britto,et al.  The faculty of language , 2007 .

[22]  Chrystopher L. Nehaniv,et al.  The Segmentation of Speech and its Implications for the Emergence of Language Structure , 2001 .

[23]  J. Werker,et al.  Cross-language speech perception: Evidence for perceptual reorganization during the first year of life , 1984 .

[24]  Peter W. Jusczyk,et al.  How infants begin to extract words from speech , 1999, Trends in Cognitive Sciences.

[25]  G. Sampson.  Educating Eve: The 'Language Instinct' Debate , 1997 .

[26]  V. Marchman,et al.  Language Learning in Infancy , 2006 .

[27]  A. Woodward,et al.  Infants' sensitivity to word boundaries in fluent speech , 1996, Journal of Child Language.

[28]  M. Arbib.  From monkey-like action recognition to human language: An evolutionary framework for neurolinguistics , 2005, Behavioral and Brain Sciences.

[29]  Noam Chomsky,et al.  The faculty of language: what is it, who has it, and how did it evolve? , 2002 .

[30]  Chrystopher L. Nehaniv,et al.  Homophony and Disambiguation Through Sequential Processes in the Evolution of Language , 2004, JSAI Workshops.

[31]  B. D. Boysson-Bardies,et al.  How Language Comes to Children: From Birth to Two Years , 1999 .

[32]  Marilyn M. Vihman,et al.  The Evolutionary Emergence of Language: The Role of Mimesis in Infant Language Development: Evidence for Phylogeny? , 2000 .

[33]  Volkmar Glauche,et al.  Ventral and dorsal pathways for language , 2008, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

[34]  Patrick Sturt,et al.  Monotonic Syntactic Processing : A Cross-linguistic Study of Attachment and Reanalysis , 1996 .

[35]  P. Niyogi,et al.  Computational and evolutionary aspects of language , 2002, Nature.

[36]  Martin A. Nowak,et al.  Population dynamics of grammar acquisition , 2002 .

[37]  Eleni Gregoromichelaki,et al.  Incrementality, Speaker-Hearer Switching and the Disambiguation Challenge , 2009 .

[38]  P. Lieberman.  Human Language and Our Reptilian Brain , 2002 .