WORK ON SYMBOL GROUNDING NOW NEEDS CONCRETE EXPERIMENTATION

摘要

A few years ago, I wrote a paper called "The symbol grounding problem has been solved. So What's Next?" (Steels, 2008) based on a talk I gave in 2005 at the very interesting Garachico workshop on "Symbols, Embodiment, and Meaning" organized by Manuel de Vega, Arthur Glenberg and Arthur Graesser. Angelo Cangelosi, who himself has made several contributions in this area (Cangelosi & Harnard, 2000), responded to this paper calling for further discussion within the developmental robotics community and I of course welcome such dialogs which are all too rare in our field. Cangelosi decomposed the symbol grounding problem in three subproblems: (1) How can a cognitive agent autonomously link symbols to referents in the world such as objects, events and internal and external states?