报告主题：Natural Language Acquisition and Grounding for Embodied Robotic Systems

报告人：Professor Anthony G Cohn, FREng School of Computing, University of Leeds(& Visiting Professor Tongji University)

报告时间：2019年9月24日，8:30

报告地点：金沙贵宾热线检测中心楼D3-518

Abstract:

We present a cognitively plausible novel framework capable of learning the grounding in visual semantics and the grammar of natural language commands given to a robot in a table

top environment. The input to the system consists of video clips of a manually controlled robot arm, paired with natural language commands describing the action. No prior knowledge is assumed about the meaning of words, or the structure of the language, except that there are different classes of words (corresponding to observable actions, spatial relations, and objects and their observable properties). The learning process automatically clusters the continuous perceptual spaces into concepts corresponding to linguistic input. A novel relational graph representation is used to build connections between language and vision. As well as the grounding of language to perception, the system also induces a set of probabilistic grammar rules. The knowledge learned is used to parse new commands involving previously unseen objects.

Tony Cohn holds BSc and PhD degrees from the University of Essex. He spent 10 years at the University of Warwick before moving to Leeds in 1990 where he founded a research group working on knowledge representation and reasoning with a particular focus on qualitative spatial/spatio-temporal reasoning. His research has broadened to encompass Cognitive Vision, Robotics, Grounding Language in Vision, Decision Support System (particularly for Urban Infrastructure), and computational neuroscience. He is Editor-in-Chief Spatial Cognition and Computation and has been Chairman/President of the UK AI Society SSAISB, the European Association for Artificial Intelligence (EurAI), KR inc, the IJCAI Board of Trustees and was the Editor-in-Chief for Artificial Intelligence 2007-2014 and of the AAAI Press 2004-14. He remains a Director of KR Inc.

He is the recipient of the 2015 IJCAI Donald E Walker Distinguished Service Award which honours senior scientists in AI for contributions and service to the field during their careers, as well as the 2012 AAAI Distinguished Service Award for “extraordinary and sustained service to the artificial intelligence community”. He is a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering, and is also a Fellow of AAAI, AISB, EurAI (Founding Fellow), the BCS, and the IET.