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Grounding Meaning through Language Games

Thursday, 26 March 1998, 12 noon
Prof. Luc Steels
VUB AI Lab (Brussels)
and Sony CSL (Paris)

Experiments are presented with physical robotic agents operating in a real-world environment. It is shown how these agents can build up a repertoire of perceptually grounded distinctions through discrimination games and how they can develop a shared lexicon verbalising these distinctions through adaptive naming games.

These experiments illustrate that language can be viewed as a complex adaptive system that emerges through self-organisation from the local interactions of individuals. Language continues to evolve and adapt due to stochasticity (which introduces innovation), uncertainty (which maintains variation), and constant renewal of its user population.

Biography: Luc Steels is a professor in Artificial Intelligence at the University of Brussels (VUB). He also directs the Sony Computer Science Laboratory in Paris. His current work focuses on behavior-oriented approaches to sensori-motor intelligence using physical robotic agents as experimental platforms, and the origins and evolution of language.

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Last modified: Thu May 11 17:18:31 PDT 2000 by emma@csli.stanford.edu