Related papers: Language Acquisition is Embodied, Interactive, Emo…
This document chronicles this author's attempt to explore how words come to mean what they do, with a particular focus on child language acquisition and what that means for models of language understanding.\footnote{I say \emph{historical}…
We review computational and robotics models of early language learning and development. We first explain why and how these models are used to understand better how children learn language. We argue that they provide concrete theories of…
A few decades of work in the AI field have focused efforts on developing a new generation of systems which can acquire knowledge via interaction with the world. Yet, until very recently, most such attempts were underpinned by research which…
Situated embodied conversation requires robots to interleave real-time dialogue with active perception: deciding what to look at, when to look, and what to say under tight latency constraints. We present a simple, minimal system recipe that…
Emotions play a central role in human communication, shaping trust, engagement, and social interaction. As artificial intelligence systems powered by large language models become increasingly integrated into everyday life, enabling them to…
Human infants are able to acquire natural language seemingly easily at an early age. Their language learning seems to occur simultaneously with learning other cognitive functions as well as with playful interactions with the environment and…
Word embeddings such as ELMo have recently been shown to model word semantics with greater efficacy through contextualized learning on large-scale language corpora, resulting in significant improvement in state of the art across many…
Interaction between caregivers and children plays a critical role in human language acquisition and development. Given this observation, it is remarkable that explicit interaction plays little to no role in artificial language modeling --…
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…
Embodied robots which can interact with their environment and neighbours are increasingly being used as a test case to develop Artificial Intelligence. This creates a need for multimodal robot controllers that can operate across different…
Learning to understand speech appears almost effortless for typically developing infants, yet from an information-processing perspective, acquiring a language from acoustic speech is an enormous challenge. This chapter reviews recent…
Efforts towards endowing robots with the ability to speak have benefited from recent advancements in natural language processing, in particular large language models. However, current language models are not fully incremental, as their…
Storytelling is fundamental to language, including culture, conversation and communication in their broadest senses. It thus emerges as an essential component of intelligent systems, including systems where natural language is not a primary…
We introduce the concept of "empathic grounding" in conversational agents as an extension of Clark's conceptualization of grounding in conversation in which the grounding criterion includes listener empathy for the speaker's affective…
Figurative language is a challenge for language models since its interpretation is based on the use of words in a way that deviates from their conventional order and meaning. Yet, humans can easily understand and interpret metaphors,…
Emotional language generation is one of the keys to human-like artificial intelligence. Humans use different type of emotions depending on the situation of the conversation. Emotions also play an important role in mediating the engagement…
Human intelligence can remarkably adapt quickly to new tasks and environments. Starting from a very young age, humans acquire new skills and learn how to solve new tasks either by imitating the behavior of others or by following provided…
In real-world scenarios, it is desirable for embodied agents to have the ability to leverage human language to gain explicit or implicit knowledge for learning tasks. Despite recent progress, most previous approaches adopt simple low-level…
Human intelligence's adaptability is remarkable, allowing us to adjust to new tasks and multi-modal environments swiftly. This skill is evident from a young age as we acquire new abilities and solve problems by imitating others or following…
Language is crucial for human intelligence, but what exactly is its role? We take language to be a part of a system for understanding and communicating about situations. The human ability to understand and communicate about situations…