Symbol Grounding, Turing Testing and Robot Talking Harnad, S; Blondin-Massé; A, St-Louis, B; Chicoisne, G; Gargouri, Y; & Picard, O. RoadMap Workshop on Action and Language Integration RoadMap Workshop on Action and Language Integration Rome, September 2008.

Associations vs. Propositions The expressive power of natural language The Church/Turing Thesis about the expressive power of computation The performance power of human cognition The Turing Test Toy models and underdetermination

Pantomime vs. Propositions Doing, Showing and Telling Truth values (T & F) Categories and category acquisition: Learning to do the right thing with the right kind of thing Sensorimotor affordances Naming and describing/defining/explaining

Symbol Grounding Language has limitless expressive power, but it cannot be words all the way down Words need to be grounded in sensorimotor categorization capacity Wittgenstein’s “meaning is use” is empty: how to design a system that can use words as humans can? Design a system that can pass the Turinf Test

Grounding Dictionary Meaning (Switch to PDFs….) Based on the MRC Psycholinguistic Database that the words in our grounding kernel are significantly more concrete and are acquired at a significantly earlier age than the words in the rest of the dictionary

ERPS During Sensorimotor Category Learning (Switch to PDFs….) Based on how prior ERP findings, these results suggest: (1) The positivity reflects the subject’s confidence in categorizing the stimuli, which depends on difficulty and improves (and accelerates) with practice. (2) The negative peak reflects improved detection of the category invariants with practice, with reduced efficiency on incorrect trials.