Relational Symbol Grounding through Affordance Learning: An Overview of the ReGround Project

Antanas, Laura et al. Grounding Language Understanding (GLU 2017) ISCA Satellite Workshop of Interspeech 2017. (PDF, PPT)

Abstract: Symbol grounding is the problem of associating symbols from language with a corresponding referent in the environment. Traditionally, research has focused on identifying single objects and their properties. The ReGround project hypothesizes that the grounding process must consider the full context of the environment, including multiple objects, their properties, and relationships among these objects. ReGround targets the development of a novel framework for “affordance grounding”, by which an agent placed in a new environment can adapt to its new setting and interpret possibly multi-modal input in order to correctly carry out the requested tasks.