Document Type
Conference Proceeding
Publication Date
2022
Abstract
Object permanence is the ability to form and recall mental representations of objects even when they are not in view. Despite being a crucial developmental step for children, object permanence has had only some exploration as it relates to symbol and communicative grounding in spoken dialogue systems. In this paper, we leverage SLAM as a module for tracking object permanence and use a robot platform to move around a scene where it discovers objects and learns how they are denoted. We evaluated by comparing our system’s effectiveness at learning words from human dialogue partners both with and without object permanence. We found that with object permanence, human dialogue partners spoke with the robot and the robot correctly identified objects it had learned about significantly more than without object permanence, which suggests that object permanence helped facilitate communicative and symbol grounding.
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Publication Information
Torres-Fonseca, Josue; Henry, Catherine; and Kennington, Casey. (2022). "Symbol and Communicative Grounding Through Object Permanence with a Mobile Robot". In O. Lemon, D. Hakkani-Tur, J.J. Li, A. Ashrafzadeh, D. Hernández Garcia, M. Alikhani, D. Vandyke, O. Dušek (Eds.), Proceedings of the 23rd Annual Meeting of the Special Interest Group on Discourse and Dialogue (pp. 124-134). Association for Computational Lingusitics. https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/2022.sigdial-1.14