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Using context and sensory data to learn first and second person pronouns

Published: 02 March 2006 Publication History

Abstract

We present a method of grounded word learning that can learn the meanings of first and second person pronouns. The model selectively associates new words with agents in the environment by using already understood words to establish context. The method uses chi-square tests to find significant associations between the new words and attributes of the relevant agents. We show that this model can learn from a transcript of a parent-child interaction that "I" refers to the person who is speaking. With the additional information that questions about wants refer to the person being asked about them, the system learns that "you" refers to the person being addressed. We show that an incorrect assumption about the subject of "want" questions can lead to pronoun reversal, a linguistic error most commonly found in autistic and congenitally blind children. Finally, we present results from a physical implementation on a robot that runs in real time.

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  • (2022)Configuring Humans: What Roles Humans Play in HRI Research2022 17th ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction (HRI)10.1109/HRI53351.2022.9889496(478-492)Online publication date: 7-Mar-2022
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  • (2009)Touch and toysProceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/1518701.1518780(491-500)Online publication date: 4-Apr-2009
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cover image ACM Conferences
HRI '06: Proceedings of the 1st ACM SIGCHI/SIGART conference on Human-robot interaction
March 2006
376 pages
ISBN:1595932941
DOI:10.1145/1121241
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Publication History

Published: 02 March 2006

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Author Tags

  1. autism
  2. deixis
  3. humanoid robot
  4. natural language
  5. pronoun reversal
  6. pronouns
  7. real-time
  8. word learning

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HRI06
HRI06: International Conference on Human Robot Interaction
March 2 - 3, 2006
Utah, Salt Lake City, USA

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Cited By

View all
  • (2022)Configuring Humans: What Roles Humans Play in HRI Research2022 17th ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction (HRI)10.1109/HRI53351.2022.9889496(478-492)Online publication date: 7-Mar-2022
  • (2014)Emergence of the use of pronouns and names in triadic human-robot spoken interaction4th International Conference on Development and Learning and on Epigenetic Robotics10.1109/DEVLRN.2014.6982970(146-152)Online publication date: Oct-2014
  • (2009)Touch and toysProceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/1518701.1518780(491-500)Online publication date: 4-Apr-2009
  • (2009)The oz of wizardProceedings of the 4th ACM/IEEE international conference on Human robot interaction10.1145/1514095.1514115(101-108)Online publication date: 9-Mar-2009
  • (2006)Social development [robots]IEEE Computational Intelligence Magazine10.1109/MCI.2006.16729871:3(41-47)Online publication date: 1-Aug-2006

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