[aaai-98.gif] 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 * Active Representations for Language Acquisition and Use - Andre, Chang & Narayanan * Perceptual Simulation in Conceptual Tasks - Barsalou * Toward a Dynamic Semantics of "HAVE A COW" - Brugman & Narayanan * A Dynamical Basis for the Semantic Content of Verbs - Cohen & Oates * Structured Connectionist Modeling of Word Learning - Feldman & Lakoff * An Architecture for the Learning of Perceptually Grounded Word Meanings - Gasser & Colunga * Grounding Meaning in Affordances - Glenberg * Spatial cognition and spatial language: What do we need to know to talk about space? - Landau * The CALLED Model of Early Word Learning - Merriman * Attention and Population Coding in Spatial Language - Regier & Carlson-Radvansky * Symbol Grounding With Delay Coordinates - Rosenstein & Cohen * Learning Audio-Visually Grounded Words from Natural Input - Roy & Pentland * On How General Learning Processes Create Language-Specific Learning Biases - Smith, Colunga & Samuelson * Grounding Meaning and Language in Situated Embodied Action - Steels * Grounding the Meaning of Symbols on the System's Experience - Wang * Form and Function in Very Early Word Learning - Woodward ________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ 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