Abstract
Our contribution situates Human-Robot Communication, especially the grounding of Natural Kind Terms, in the interface of Artificial Intelligence, Cognitive Psychology, Philosophy, Robotics and Semantics. We investigate whether a robot can be grounded in the sense favoured in Artificial Intelligence and Philosophy.We thus extend the notion of grounding to social symbol grounding using an interactive perspective addressing the question how grounding can be achieved in detail in interaction. For the acquisition of Natural Kind Terms we establish the notions of foundational common ground and foundational grounding in contrast to the established common ground and grounding. We introduce the robot setting used and provide a deep evaluation of a tutorial dialogue between a user and the robot. We investigate these Human-Robot Communication data from an ethno-methodological and an “omniscient” perspective (the latter amounting to consideration of automatic speech recognition results) and test whether these perspectives matter for analysing grounding. We show that the robot has acquired a partial concept of a Natural Kind Term—represented by statistics over visual object features—and that this is shared knowledge, hence the first step of a grounding sequence. Finally, we argue that grounding of robots can be achieved and extended to situated structures of considerable complexity.
Highlights
Grounding is a notion used in semantic and pragmatic theories dealing with the generation of reliable collective or public information
We started from the classical concept of grounding based on definitions given by D
Trying to apply it to human-robot communication (HRC), we found that the classical concept, oriented towards human-human communication (HHC), presupposes a lot, above all that the conversational participants (CPs) under investigation share the same language, especially its semantics
Summary
Grounding is a notion used in semantic and pragmatic theories dealing with the generation of (mostly) reliable collective or public information. If the addressees accept or acknowledge the information the speaker and the addressees share it, it is common to them This common information can be presupposed in the following part of the dialogue or in new conversations which in a way rely on the current CPs. Common ground can be produced by unknown sources and spread in the public by various media. In human-human communication (HHC), the obstacles to grounding and the production of common ground are numerous They range from problems of hearing to disbelieved information and arguments regarded with suspicion. In our paper we start from this well-established notion of common ground and investigate whether it can be a guiding concept in robotics, more precisely, in human-robot communication (HRC). The reason is that the robot’s command of an NKT should be backed by common knowledge, i.e. socially anchored If this is the case, the robot uses the NKT according to accepted lexical conventions.
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