Learning adjectives and nouns from affordances on the iCub humanoid robot


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Yürüten O., Uyanik K. F., Çalişkan Y., Bozcuoǧlu A. K., ŞAHİN E., KALKAN S.

12th International Conference on Simulation of Adaptive Behavior, SAB 2012, Odense, Denmark, 27 - 30 August 2012, vol.7426 LNAI, pp.330-340 identifier

  • Publication Type: Conference Paper / Full Text
  • Volume: 7426 LNAI
  • Doi Number: 10.1007/978-3-642-33093-3_33
  • City: Odense
  • Country: Denmark
  • Page Numbers: pp.330-340
  • Keywords: adjectives, affordances, nouns
  • Middle East Technical University Affiliated: Yes

Abstract

This article studies how a robot can learn nouns and adjectives in language. Towards this end, we extended a framework that enabled robots to learn affordances from its sensorimotor interactions, to learn nouns and adjectives using labeling from humans. Specifically, an iCub humanoid robot interacted with a set of objects (each labeled with a set of adjectives and a noun) and learned to predict the effects (as labeled with a set of verbs) it can generate on them with its behaviors. Different from appearance-based studies that directly link the appearances of objects to nouns and adjectives, we first predict the affordances of an object through a set of Support Vector Machine classifiers which provided a functional view of the object. Then, we learned the mapping between these predicted affordance values and nouns and adjectives. We evaluated and compared a number of different approaches towards the learning of nouns and adjectives on a small set of novel objects. The results show that the proposed method provides better generalization than the appearance-based approaches towards learning adjectives whereas, for nouns, the reverse is the case. We conclude that affordances of objects can be more informative for (a subset of) adjectives describing objects in language. © 2012 Springer-Verlag.