'When I use a word,' Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, 'it means just what I choose it to mean neither more nor less.' Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass.
Talking with robots
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Date: |
Tuesday 23 November 2010 |
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Time: |
9.00am - 10.30am |
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Place: |
The Terrace (level 6 building 14 UQ St Lucia campus) |
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Speakers: |
Gordon Wyeth, Ruth Schulz, Arren Glover, Janet Wiles (See titles below) |
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Cost: |
Free |
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Contact: |
Barbara Whittaker b.whittaker@uq.edu.au or phone 3365 4275 |
INTRODUCTION
How do you know what you mean when you use a word? Could you teach that meaning to a household robot? The Lingodroids project is a joint collaboration between UQ and QUT researchers to develop robots that can learn to use language for achieving everyday tasks. How could a robot build up the concepts to describe important places in its environment, then learn to use those names in productive and flexible ways? Would the use of a shared language for space change the robots' spatial concepts as has been argued for human languages? Listen (and debate) with roboticists and linguists about the best ways to develop robot languages, what words mean (or should mean), and how robotics can learn from how they are represented in human brains.
Words, events, and dinosaur bones: Questioning the need for a mental lexicon
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Date: |
Tuesday 23 November 2010 |
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Time: |
11.00am - 12.30pm |
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Place: |
The Terrace (level 6 building 14 UQ St Lucia campus) |
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Speaker: |
Professor Jeff Elman, University of California, San Diego |
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Cost: |
Free |
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Host: |
Janet Wiles, ITEE |
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Contact: |
Barbara Whittaker b.whittaker@uq.edu.au or phone 3365 4275 |
ABSTRACT
Over the past decade there has been increasing interest in the lexicon as the locus of users' language knowledge. This represents an interesting sea change from the time when linguists were focused primarily on rules. There is now a considerable body of linguistic and psycholinguistic research that has led many researchers to conclude that the mental lexicon contains richly detailed information about both general and specific aspects of language. Words are in again, it seems.
Virtually all accounts of language assume that word knowledge resides in a kind of mental dictionary, the lexicon. Indeed, belief in the lexicon is so widespread that it is existence is of the few points of agreement between theories that are in other respects wildly different. In this talk I suggest that the lexicon may not in fact be the best way of capturing the knowledge that language users have about words. I will describe a body of psycholinguistic data, involving both behavioral and event-related potential experiments, as well as results of computational studies, that argue for a very different approach to representing word knowledge. In the course of developing this argument, I also will suggest that event knowledge plays an immediate and critical role in the on-line processes of language comprehension, and that event knowledge plays a foundational role in our knowledge of causality. The role of dinosaur bones will be revealed at the end.
ABOUT THE SPEAKER
Jeffrey L. Elman has made several major contributions to the theoretical foundations of human cognition, most notably in the areas of language and development. His work has had an immense impact across fields as diverse as cognitive science, psycholinguistics, developmental psychology, evolutionary theory, computer science and linguistics. Elman's 1990 paper Finding Structure in Time introduced a new way of thinking about language knowledge, language processing, and language learning based on distributed representations in connectionist networks. The paper is listed as one of the 10 most-cited papers in the field of psychology between 1990 and 1994, and the most often cited paper in psycholinguistics in that period. This work, together with earlier Elman's earlier work on speech perception and subsequent work on learnability, representation, innateness, and development, continues to shape the research agendas of researchers in cognitive science, psycholinguistics, and many other fields. Many of Elman's ideas about ontogeny were worked out in detail with several colleagues in the 1996 book, Rethinking innateness: A connectionist perspective on development, where the Nature-Nurture controversy is redefined in new terms. Elman is Distinguished Professor in the Department of Cognitive Science, as well as Dean of the Division of Social Sciences at UCSD and Co-Director of the Kavli Institute for Brain and Mind. He was the 2007 recipient of The David E. Rumelhart Prize, for Contributions to the Theoretical Foundations of Human Cognition.
RELATED EVENTS
Attendees may also be interested in the "Talking with Robots Workshop" in the same venue just before Jeff's lecture (starting 9am) and the "Thinking Systems symposium: Brains, Robots and Navigation" on Monday 22nd November at QBI, for details see www.thinkingsystems.edu.au
Program
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9.00 - 9.20am |
Professor Gordon Wyeth, QUT
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9.20 - 9.40 |
Dr Ruth Schulz, UQ
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9.40 - 10.00am |
Arren Glover, QUT |
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10.00 - 10.10am |
Student projects |
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10.10 - 10.30am |
Professor Janet Wiles, UQ |
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10.30 - 11.00am |
Coffee break |
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11.00 - 12.00pm |
Professor Jeff Elman, UCSD |
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12.00 - 12.30pm |
Questions and Discussion |
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12.30pm |
Finish |