Contemporary Approaches to Symbol Grounding

1
Contemporary Approaches to Symbol Grounding

• Moshe Looks
• Washington University in St. Louis
• Novamente LLC

2
Symbol Grounding Problem for Classic AI

• Symbols are abstract tokens formally related to
  other tokens

cat
fish
eats( , )
foos(bar, baz)
How do tokens foo, bar, and baz come to mean eat,
cat, and fish?
3
Building up to symbols

• Iconic
• Similarity-based relations
• Indexical
• Arbitrary (non-similarity-based) associative
  relations
• Symbolic
• Relations among (initially) indexical tokens
• Deacon (The Symbolic Species), based on Pierce

4
Building up to symbols

• Shifting from indexical to symbolic processing
• Normally onlyoccurs inhumans

5
Work in AI

• Unsupervised learning inspired by Pierce/Deacon
  (Roy)
• Objects
• Color / Shape / Size
• the red square
• the large blue box
• Basic Relationships
• To-the-left-of
• But does it scale??

6
Claim

• Progress on symbol grounding (in AI) will remain
  stagnant until approached from an AGI perspective

7
Learning Experiments in AGI-SIM

• Nearness
• Word-Object Associations
• Fetch

8
Post-Embodied AI

• Symbol grounding is a challenge for brains and
  for Novamente
• but for nearly opposite reasons