AAAI 1998 Workshop

The Grounding of Word Meaning: Data and Models

Madison Concourse Hotel
Madison, Wisconsin, USA
July 31, 1998


Language begins with the acquisition of word meaning, and a normal child masters tens of thousands of words over the course of the ensuing years. Understanding how this happens is fundamental to understanding how language works as well as to the development of viable computational approaches to language acquisition.

Early research on the development of word meaning focused on constraints that were internal to the linguistic system or to relationships between language and symbolic thought. More recently, however, there have been attempts to "ground" or "embody" meaning in general cognitive/perceptual processes or in the body of the organism interacting with its environment. The advent of connectionism has opened up the possibility of models which relate analog systems to discrete categories, thus of explicit models of perception and motor control. Recently some connectionists have begun to model the acquisition of word meaning, usually focusing on the way in which meaning arises out of a system perceiving the world. This work is consistent with the growing grounding/embodiment view among empirical researchers. However, the psychologists, linguists, anthropologists, and biologists may be unaware of what neural networks, especially those with built-in modularity, are capable of, and the AI researchers could benefit from greater familiarity with the data. The goal of this workshop is to bring together these different communities.

The workshop will be organized around 20-minute position statements by 16 participants. Following each group of statements and at the end of the workshop, there will be time for discussion.



Participants

Email to all participants

(1Co-authors of papers not attending the workshop. 2Not presenting papers.)

1David Andre dandre@ICSI.Berkeley.EDU
2Dale Barr daleb@ccp.uchicago.edu
Lawrence Barsalou barsalou@emory.edu
2Rik Belew rik@cs.ucsd.edu
1Claudia Brugman claudia.brugman@stonebow.otago.ac.nz
2Curt Burgess curt@doumi.UCR.EDU
Laura Carlson-Radvansky laura.c.radvansky.2@nd.edu
Nancy Chang nchang@ICSI.Berkeley.EDU
2Morten Christiansen morten@gizmo.usc.edu
Paul Cohen cohen@cs.umass.edu
Eliana Colunga ecolunga@cs.indiana.edu
2Rutvik Desai rudesai@cs.indiana.edu
1Jerome Feldman jfeldman@ICSI.Berkeley.EDU
Michael Gasser gasser@cs.indiana.edu
Arthur Glenberg glenberg@facstaff.wisc.edu
2Frederic Kaplan kaplan@csl.sony.fr
1George Lakoff lakoff@cogsci.berkeley.edu
Barbara Landau blandau@udel.edu
2Jun Luo junluo@cs.indiana.edu
William Merriman wmerrima@kent.edu
Srini Narayanan snarayan@ICSI.Berkeley.EDU
James T. Oates oates@hinden.cs.umass.edu
Terry Regier regier@uchicago.edu
Michael Rosenstein mtr@freya.cs.umass.edu
Deb Roy dkroy@media.mit.edu
1Larissa Samuelson samuelso@indiana.edu
Linda B. Smith smith4@indiana.edu
1Luc Steels steels@arti.vub.ac.be
2Richard Teng rjteng@students.wisc.edu
Paul Vogt paul@arti.vub.ac.be
Pei Wang pwang@cogsci.indiana.edu
Amanda Woodward alw1@ccp.uchicago.edu



Position Statements


Schedule


Workshop Organizers

Michael Gasser (chair), Indiana University, gasser@cs.indiana.edu
Terry Regier, University of Chicago, regier@uchicago.edu
eliana colunga-leal
Last modified: Mon Jul 27 21:26:57 EST 1998