Introducing Conceptual Grammar

This report describes research done at the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The author was sponsored by the Institute of International Education on an ITT-fellowship.This paper contains an informal and sketchy overview of a new way of thinking about linguistics and linguistic processing known as conceptual grammar. Some ideas are presented on what kind of knowledge is involved in a natural language, how this knowledge is organized and represented and how it is activated and acquired.MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory Institute of International Education on an ITT-fellowshi

Language games for autonomous robots

Integration and grounding are key AI challenges for human-robot dialogue. As such, a language game which is a sequence of verbal interactions between two agents situated in a specific environment is proposed. It integrates both the various activities required for dialogue and ground unknown words or phrases in a specific context, which helps constrain possible meanings.Peer Reviewe

A self-organizing spatial vocabulary

Language is a shared set of conventions for mapping meanings to utterances. This paper explores self-organization as the primary mechanism for the formation of a vocabulary. It reports on a computational experiment in which a group of distributed agents develop ways to identify each other using names or spatial descriptions. It is also shown that the proposed mechanism copes with the acquisition of an existing vocabulary by new agents entering the community and with an expansion of the set of meanings.The research and writing of this paper has been financed by the Belgian Federal government FKFO project on emergent functionality (FKFO contract no. G.0014.95) and the IUAP >Construct> Project (no. 20) of the Belgian government, with additional support from the external researcher program of the Sony Computer Science Laboratory in Tokyo.Peer Reviewe

Social learning and verbal communication with humanoid robots

Trabajo presentado a la IEEE-RAS International Conference on Humanoid Robots, celebrada en New York (US) en 2001.The paper discusses issues in the design of openended and grounded communication with humanoid robots. A number of design principles and design maxims are proposed. The key idea of the paper is that social learning can play a crucial role in bootstrapping a humanoid robot into lnguistic culture.N

The XPRT Description System

This report describes research done at the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The author was sponsored by the Institute of International Education on an ITT-fellowship.This paper introduces a frame-based description language and studies methods for reasoning about problems using knowledge expressed in the language. The system is based on the metaphor of a society of communicating experts and incorporates within this framework most of the currently known AI techniques, such as pattern-directed invocation, explicit control of reasoning, propagation of constraints, dependency recording, context mechanisms, message passing, conflict resolution, default reasoning, etc.MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory Institute of International Educatio

Some Examples of Conceptual Grammar

This report describes research done at the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The author was sponsored by the Institute of International Education on an ITT-fellowship.This paper gives some examples of the conceptual grammar approach to the representation of linguistic knowledge. First we give a short overview of the language we use to represent knowledge. Then we discuss an example that deals with the expression of verbal parameters (such as voice and aspect) in English verbal groups. Finally we discuss an example of a formal language.MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory Institute of International Educatio

Semiotic dynamics for embodied agents

Artificial intelligence explores the many different aspects of intelligence like a meandering stream carving out rivers, lakes, and deltas in an endless magnificent landscape. Each time new vistas on intelligence open up, we build new technologies to explore them and find new types of applications. In this article, the author briefly illustrate the current study of semiotic dynamics, the resulting technologies, and the field's impact on current and future intelligent systems applications.The ECAgents project—funded by the Future and Emerging Technologies program (IST-FET) of the European Commission under EU RD contract IST-1940—partly supported this research, conducted at the Sony Computer Science Laboratory Paris.Peer Reviewe

A case study in the behavior-oriented design of autonomous agents

Trabajo presentado a la 3rd International Conference on Simulation of Adaptive Behavior (SAB), celebrada en Brighton (Inglaterra) del 8 al 12 de 1994.The paper documents a case study in the design and implementation of a robotic multi-agent system. It illustrates known design guidelines, namely that the physics of the environment must be exploited, that behavior is the result from the interaction dynamics between the agent and the environment, and that emergent behavior can and must be utilised whenever possible. But the case study also challenges certain views, such as the subsumption architecture, the need for an action selection mechanism, the goal-oriented design methodology dominating the literature on planning, and the algorithmic style of writing control programs. Alternatives are explored in the form of a cooperative, parallel, behavior-oriented design.Research has been funded by the ESPRIT basic research project SUBSYM particularly some of the early hardware development, and by the Belgian Government IUAP Centre of Excellence grant to the VUB AI lab.N

The biology and technology of intelligent autonomous agents

Guest editorial.We thank Dr. L. Veiga da Cunha, director of the NATO ASI program for the support throughout the whole administrative process associated with the Nato funding. This funding is hereby gratefully acknowledged.Peer Reviewe

The FORLI.OLB package for list processing in fortran IV

The paper discusses a number of functions and subroutines which all deal with list processing and are written in the programming language FORTRAN IV. After a brief introduction to the concept of list structures, a user's manual is given.Peer reviewe