Serge Thill and Sebastian Padó and Tom Ziemke. On the importance of a rich embodiment in the grounding of concepts: Perspectives from embodied cognitive science and computational linguistics. Topics in Cognitive Science 6(3):545-558. 2014. doi:10.1111/tops.12093.
The recent trend in cognitive robotics experiments on language learning, symbol grounding and related issues necessarily entrails a reduction of sensorimotor aspects from those provided by a human body to those that can be realised in machines, limiting robotic models of symbol grounding in this respect. Here, we argue that there is a need for modelling work in this domain to explicitly take into account the richer human embodiment even for concrete concepts that prima facie relate merely to simple actions and illustrate this using distributional methods from computational linguistics which allow us to investigate grounding of concepts based on their actual usage. We also argue that these techniques have applications in theories and models of grounding, particularly in machine implementations thereof . Similarly, considering the grounding of concepts in human terms may be of benefit to future work in computational linguistics, in particular in going beyond "grounding" concepts in the textual modality alone. Overall, we highlight the overall potential for a mutually beneficial relationship between the two fields.
@Article{thill14_importance,
author = {Serge Thill and Sebastian Pad\'o and Tom Ziemke},
title = {On the importance of a rich embodiment in the
grounding of concepts: Perspectives from embodied
cognitive science and computational linguistics},
journal = {Topics in Cognitive Science},
year = 2014
}