Publications

Publication details [#60929]

Gärdenfors, Peter, Anne-Laure Mealier, Grégoire Pointeau and Peter Ford Dominey. 2016. Construals of meaning. The role of attention in robotic language production. Interaction Studies 17 (1) : 41–69.
Publication type
Article in journal
Publication language
English
Place, Publisher
John Benjamins
Journal DOI
10.1075/is

Annotation

In robotics research with language-based interaction, simplifications are made, such that a given event can be described in a unique manner, where there is a direct mapping between event representations and sentences that can describe these events. However, common experience tells us that the same physical event can be described in multiple ways, depending on the perspective of the speaker. The current research develops methods for representing events from multiple perspectives, and for choosing the perspective that will be used for generating a linguistic construal, based on attentional processes in the system. The multiple perspectives are based on the principle that events can be considered in terms of the force driving the event, and the result obtained from the event, based on the theory of Gärdenfors. In addition, within these perspectives a further refinement can be made with respect to the agent, object, and recipient perspectives. This study develops a system for generating appropriate construals of meaning, and demonstrates how this can be used in a realistic dialogic interaction between a behaving robot and a human interlocutor.