Perceptual Anchoring with Indefinite Descriptions

Anchoring is the problem of how to connect, inside an artificial system, the symbol-level and signal- level representations of the same physical object. In most previous work on anchoring, symbol-level representations were meant to denote one specific object, like 'the red pen p22'. These are also called definite descriptions. In this paper, we study an- choring in the case of indefinite descriptions, like 'a red pen '. A key point of our study is that an- choring with an indefinite description involves, in general, the selection of one object among several perceived objects that satisfy that description. We analyze several strategies to perform object selec- tion, and compare them with the problem of action selection in autonomous embedded agents.