Speaking About Robots: Languages and Characterizations

摘要

French is my native language, English is my research language and Japanese is my teaching language. Every day I juggle in my professional environment with these three languages, that have very different characteristics. And mainly, I talk about robots. While acquiring this ability over the years, studying the grammar of each language I speak, I have encountered many linguistic issues that are unique to each language and to when talking about robots. These issues are not language issue per se, because the grammar is not ambiguous, they are mainly related to the ambiguous definition and position of the robots. Indeed, even if robots and humans are ontologically different, robots are nothing like common artifacts. In this chapter, we will show some of the difficulties encountered when talking about robots, what they reveal about us and about the robots and more generally about the connections that we build with these robots.