Related papers: Living Machines: A study of atypical animacy

The cognitive essence of humans is deeply intertwined with the concept of animacy, which plays an essential role in shaping their memory, vision, and multi-layered language understanding. Although animacy appears in language via nuanced…

Animacy - whether an entity is alive and sentient - is fundamental to cognitive processing, impacting areas such as memory, vision, and language. However, animacy is not always expressed directly in language: in English it often manifests…

This paper presents the first unsupervised approach to lexical semantic change that makes use of contextualised word representations. We propose a novel method that exploits the BERT neural language model to obtain representations of word…

We address the problem of bootstrapping language acquisition for an artificial system similarly to what is observed in experiments with human infants. Our method works by associating meanings to words in manipulation tasks, as a robot…

Formal language techniques have been used in the past to study autonomous dynamical systems. However, for controlled systems, new features are needed to distinguish between information generated by the system and input control. We show how…

Language is an effective medium for bi-directional communication in human-robot teams. To infer the meaning of many instructions, robots need to construct a model of their surroundings that describe the spatial, semantic, and metric…

Imitation learning in robots, also called programing by demonstration, has made important advances in recent years, allowing humans to teach context dependant motor skills/tasks to robots. We propose to extend the usual contexts…

Recently, there has been growing interest in the ability of Transformer-based models to produce meaningful embeddings of text with several applications, such as text similarity. Despite significant progress in the field, the explanations…

Transformer architectures show significant promise for natural language processing. Given that a single pretrained model can be fine-tuned to perform well on many different tasks, these networks appear to extract generally useful linguistic…

Recently, the automatic prediction of personality traits has received increasing attention and has emerged as a hot topic within the field of affective computing. In this work, we present a novel deep learning-based approach for automated…

Human infants learn language while interacting with their environment in which their caregivers may describe the objects and actions they perform. Similar to human infants, artificial agents can learn language while interacting with their…

Text classification helps analyse texts for semantic meaning and relevance, by mapping the words against this hierarchy. An analysis of various types of texts is invaluable to understanding both their semantic meaning, as well as their…

The way the words are used evolves through time, mirroring cultural or technological evolution of society. Semantic change detection is the task of detecting and analysing word evolution in textual data, even in short periods of time. In…

We present a new method to detect anomalies in texts (in general: in sequences of any data), using language models, in a totally unsupervised manner. The method considers probabilities (likelihoods) generated by a language model, but…

With the rise of generative language models, machine-generated text detection has become a critical challenge. A wide variety of models is available, but inconsistent datasets, evaluation metrics, and assessment strategies obscure…

In anaphora resolution for English, animacy identification can play an integral role in the application of agreement restrictions between pronouns and candidates, and as a result, can improve the accuracy of anaphora resolution systems. In…

We introduce a method for decentralized person re-identification in robot swarms that leverages natural language as the primary representational modality. Unlike traditional approaches that rely on opaque visual embeddings --…

Vision language models (VLMs) are AI systems paired with both language and vision encoders to process multimodal input. They are capable of performing complex semantic tasks such as automatic captioning, but it remains an open question…

In recent years, robots are used in an increasing variety of tasks, especially by small- and medium- sized enterprises. These tasks are usually fast-changing, they have a collaborative scenario and happen in unpredictable environments with…

Neural network-based systems can now learn to locate the referents of words and phrases in images, answer questions about visual scenes, and execute symbolic instructions as first-person actors in partially-observable worlds. To achieve…