A Developmental Approach to Concept Learning

Liesl Wigand, Monica Nicolescu, Mircea Nicolescu

2013

Abstract

The ability to learn new concepts is essential for any robot to be successful in real-world applications. This is due to the fact that it is impractical for a robot designer to pre-endow it with all the concepts that it would encounter during its operational lifetime. In this context, it becomes necessary that the robot is able to acquire new concepts, in a real-world context, from cues provided in natural, unconstrained interactions, similar to a human-teaching approach. However, existing approaches on concept learning from visual images and abstract concept learning address this problem in a manner that makes them unsuitable for learning in an embodied, real-world environment. This paper presents a developmental approach to concept learning. The proposed system learns abstract, generic features of objects and associates words from sentences referring to those objects with the features, thus providing a grounding for the meaning of the words. The method thus allows the system to later identify such features in previously unseen images. The paper presents results obtained on data acquired with a Kinect camera and on synthetic images.

Paper Citation

in Harvard Style

Wigand L., Nicolescu M. and Nicolescu M. (2013). A Developmental Approach to Concept Learning . In Proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Informatics in Control, Automation and Robotics - Volume 2: ICINCO, ISBN 978-989-8565-71-6, pages 337-344. DOI: 10.5220/0004483803370344

in Bibtex Style

@conference{icinco13,
author={Liesl Wigand and Monica Nicolescu and Mircea Nicolescu},
title={A Developmental Approach to Concept Learning},
booktitle={Proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Informatics in Control, Automation and Robotics - Volume 2: ICINCO,},
year={2013},
pages={337-344},
publisher={SciTePress},
organization={INSTICC},
doi={10.5220/0004483803370344},
isbn={978-989-8565-71-6},
}

in EndNote Style

TY - CONF
JO - Proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Informatics in Control, Automation and Robotics - Volume 2: ICINCO,
TI - A Developmental Approach to Concept Learning
SN - 978-989-8565-71-6
AU - Wigand L.
AU - Nicolescu M.
AU - Nicolescu M.
PY - 2013
SP - 337
EP - 344
DO - 10.5220/0004483803370344