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.
(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 |