Abstract
The paper proposes a method for representing idioms (in particular, colour-related idioms) within the framework of Fluid Construction Grammar (FCG). The main purpose of this endeavour is to facilitate (figurative) language grounding in humanoid robots in the near future. There is sufficient evidence in the cognitive robotics literature that figurative language plays (or, will play) an important role in humanoid robots. Idioms pose a real challenge to satisfactory human-robot interaction due to the plethora of linguistic and contextual subtleties. In my approach, the starting point for encoding idioms within FCG was the selection of several colour-related idioms due to the fact that they could be well-integrated in current robotics experiments. Humanoid robots (for instance, the iCub) are frequently subjected to simple colour-related experiments (such as, learning how to lift and manipulate colourful objects, etc.). Introducing much more difficult tasks, such as recognising colour-idioms as abstract, is needed to achieve further robotic development. The paper presents some techniques on the theoretical encoding of idioms, as well as practical guidelines on how to implement custom figurative constructions within FCG.
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- 1.
Also known as: artificial cognitive systems research, Epigenetic Robotics, Autonomous Mental Development (AMD), and Cognitive Developmental Robotics (CDR) (Metta and Cangelosi in [12, p. 613]). In this paper the term cognitive robotics will be used.
- 2.
Some details concerning FCG are discussed in the methodology section.
- 3.
For more information consult Steels in [18] and http://emergent-languages.org/?page_id=17 for multimedia resources.
- 4.
Code and pseudo-code is hereby conventionally marked by typewriter font. Comments are introduced and closed by ***. Lexemes are written in italics.
- 5.
Although SLIME worked flawlessly during the entire experiment, it did crash once due to a faulty interaction with Swank. It was a major problem that could not be solved using the graphical interface.
- 6.
The Babel software can be downloaded for free at: https://www.fcg-net.org/download/ and http://emergent-languages.org/Babel2/.
- 7.
The algorithm is described in detail in Steels [16, pp. 12–13].
- 8.
See Steels in [16, p. 11] for an in-depth discussion of slots.
- 9.
It is advised that the launch file be named .ccl-init.lisp and placed in the root user’s directory.
- 10.
Another package, IRL (Incremental Recruitment Language) is also employed in studies on language grounding in robots. However, FCG is better suited for the purposes of my paper.
- 11.
Meet is a basic operation that can be understood as syntactic concatenation. ==1 denotes the so-called footprints and should be ignored at the stage of simple processing of phrases. They are important in more complex constructions.
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Gwóźdź, M. (2020). Figurative Language Grounding in Humanoid Robots. In: Bi, Y., Bhatia, R., Kapoor, S. (eds) Intelligent Systems and Applications. IntelliSys 2019. Advances in Intelligent Systems and Computing, vol 1038. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-29513-4_25
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