Panel Discussion I: Brainstorm on Language,

Embodiment and the Critical minass of Intelligence

Moderator: Alexei Samsonovich Panelists: Kenneth De Jong, Dennis

Perzanowski, Stuart Shapiro, Ralph Weischedel, Antonio Chella, Wei Chen, Roberto Pirrone,

Christian Lebiere

Objective: Agenda:

Samsonovich 3 minLanguage acquisition by children

Perzanowski 5 minGoertzel 5 minWeischedel 5 min

Bridging the gapsLebiere 5 minChella 5 minShapiro 5 min

Identifying a critical massChen 5 minPirrone 5 minDe Jong 5 min

Response from the audiencegeneral discussion 12 min

To identify a sufficient language component of a super-critical mass of intelligence and embodiment that would enable a bootstrapped cognitive growth of an artifact up to a human level of general intelligence

Introduction

language acquisition by children

Questions to Dennis Perzanowski:• The work of Deb Roy directed at learning how

children acquire language implies understanding the cognitive steps and stages of develoopment, and then emulating and embodying them on robotic platforms.

– What should we borrow from these studies of the

acquisition of language by young children?

– E.g., how the agent will develop an understanding of concepts associated with linguistic constructs?

Questions to Ralph Weischedel:• If language is the key to the human mind, then

understanding the process of language acquisition could be the key to developing human-level intelligence. Specific questions include:

– What should we borrow from studies of the acquisition of language by young children?

– E.g., how the agent will develop an understanding of

concepts associated with linguistic constructs?

• See next 3 slides prepared by Ralph Weischedel

6

What should we borrow from studies of the acquisition of language by young

children?

Ralph Weischedel

November 7, 2008

7

An Interesting Question, Given History

• 70s-80s–Computational Linguistics–Hand-crafted rules–Reason from a handful of

examples/counter-examples• 90s

–Natural Language Processing–Statistical learning approaches–Empirical evaluation on blind

test data• 2000s

–90s +–Semi-supervised learning from

WWW• 2010s?

– Inspiration of child language acquisition?

8

What should we Borrow from Child Language Acquisition?

Positively Inspiring • Leaning paradigm

– Training data• Image/video + description• Touch (+ description)

– Output capability• Brief utterances• Actions (move, touch, push)

• Simultaneous generalization in multiple spaces – Image space

• Forming object/activity class– Speech signal– Lexicon

• What might be innate (and built in for a system)

• Children interact with – Care-givers – Environment

Not Biologically Bound • Machines have vast amount of

information (text, images and, video) online– A basis for unsupervised

learning

One reply from the audience

Bridging the gaps

Questions to Christian Lebiere:• The relation between language and the cognitive

architecture, including its basic components, memory systems, kinds of representations, and principles of information processing. Specific questions include:

– Is language processing an underlying capacity for other faculties like symbolic processing, or vice versa?

– What kinds of architectural mechanisms should be

involved in language processing?

Questions to Antonio Chella:• The kinds of representation and information processing

needed for the critical mass. Specific questions include: •

– What is the missing link between the following two levels of representations? (i) The higher symbolic level that underlies language, reasoning, attention control, planning and decision making. (ii) The lower subsymbolic level associated with neural network dynamics and signal processing.

– Is this missing link a missing component of the critical mass?

– How the conceptual spaces proposed by Gärdenfors (2000) may allow us to bridge this gap?

Questions to Stuart Shapiro:• An example of a potential critical mass: GLAIR architecture that uses symbols in

the Knowledge Layer as "pivots" that each may be aligned with one or more bodily modalities. Thus, one can identify (in NL) and manipulate what one sees, or one may find in the environment what one hears about (via NL). More work is still needed on self-awareness, and on identifying the basic cognitive building blocks that underlie all languages and cultures, and that therefore allow an intelligent agent to learn any language and culture it is brought up in. Specific questions include:

– What are the general critical mass requirements for the embodiment and the interface, including environment, domain, perception and action capabilities?

– What are the general critical mass requirements for the communication capabilities, including initial natural language capabilities?

– What are the general critical mass requirements for the "innate" (pre-programmed) general knowledge?

• See next 3 slides prepared by Stuart Shapiro

KL (SNePS)

PMLa

PMLb

PMLc

SAL

Mind

BodyIndependent

of lower-bodyimplementation

Hearing

Vision

Motion

Speech WORLD

I/P s o c k e t s

MGLAIR Agent Architecture

Dependenton lower-body

implementation

Proprioception

AlignmentKL

Body (PML/SAL)

World

SNePS term

PML structure

Object/Phenomenon Action

Jackendoff Version

Ray Jackendoff, Foundations of Language,Oxford University Press, 2002, Fig. 11.1, p. 348.(Independent work)

One reply from the audience

Identifying a (super)critical mass

Questions to Wei Chen:• The critical mass of linguistic, cognitive and interface

capabilities that will enable cognitive growth of an artifact. Specific questions include:

– What are the general critical mass requirements for the memory systems, kinds of representations and principles of information processing?

– What are the general critical mass requirements for the communication capabilities, including initial natural language capabilities?

– What are the general critical mass requirements for the "innate" (pre-programmed) general knowledge?

Questions to Roberto Pirrone:• The connection between language in AI and

educational sciences, specifically, language understanding techniques used in education. Specific questions include:

– What is the applicability of Cognitive Linguistics techniques to the task of understanding language in educational practice?

– What is the need for a language understanding component in a framework for student tutoring, and how this component should be implemented?

Questions to Kenneth De Jong:

• The notion of a critical mass apparently involves higher cognitive abilities like metacognition and the sense of self.

– Can we identify a (super)critical mass in terms of higher cognitive abilities?

– What is the connection with other aspects, e.g., linguistic and evolutionary requirements?

General discussion and conclusions

• "Critical mass" can be understood as a minimal set of intelligent capabilities and features of embodiment, such that, when integrated in an artifact, together will enable its cognitive growth up to a human level via teaching, social interactions and guided exploration of knowledge resources and environments. Then what, in your view, are its critical components, and how close we are to creating them?

• What can you say regarding "the ladder", i.e., the curriculum for artifacts understood as the sequence of tasks, paradigms and intermediate learning goals that will scaffold their rapid cognitive growth up to the human level? Can you imagine a successful cognitive growth scenario: e.g., as initially discussed within BICA program, from a simple egg hunt to a general human level of intelligence?

• Reproducing the cognitive growth phenomenon in a lab is a fundamental scientific problem. The expected phenomenon, however, has a known biological counterpart: child development. What should we borrow from biological, cognitive, educational, social, etc. sciences in order to ensure success?

• How can we imagine a roadmap to human-level-intelligent artifacts? What would be a sequence of waypoints and a realistic timetable for reaching them? What should be the cost of the project?