This position paper proposes that the study of embodied cognitive agents, such as humanoid robots, can advance our understanding of the cognitive development of complex sensorimotor, linguistic and social learning skills. This in turn will benefit the design of cognitive robots capable of learning to handle and manipulate objects and tools autonomously, to cooperate and communicate with other robots and humans, and to adapt their abilities to changing internal, environmental, and social conditions. Four key areas of research challenges are discussed, specifically for the issues related to the understanding of: (i) how agents learn and represent compositional actions; (ii) how agents learn and represent compositional lexicons; (iii) the dynamics of social interaction and learning; and (iv) how compositional action and language representations are integrated to bootstrap the cognitive system. The review of specific issues and progress in these areas is then translated into a practical roadmap based on a series of milestones. These milestones provide a possible set of cognitive robotics goals and test-scenarios, thus acting as a research roadmap for future work on cognitive developmental robotics.

Computational models have played a central role in the debate over language learnability. This article discusses how they have been used in different “stances”, from generative views to more recently introduced explanatory frameworks based on embodiment, cognitive development and cultural evolution. By digging into the details of certain specific models, we show how they organize, transform and rephrase defining questions about what makes language learning possible for children. Finally, we present a tentative synthesis to recast the debate using the notion of learning bias.

This paper shows how experiments on artificial language evolution can provide highly relevant results for important debates in linguistic theories. It reports on a series of experiments that investigate how semantic roles can emerge in a population of artificial embodied agents and how these agents can build a network of constructions. The experiment also includes a fully operational implementation of how event-specific participant-roles can be fused with the semantic roles of argument-structure constructions and thus contributes to the linguistic debate on how the syntax-semantics interface is organized. 1.

How can we explain the enormous amount of creativity and flexibility in spatial language use? In this paper we detail computational experiments that try to capture the essence of this puzzle. We hypothesize that flexible semantics which allow agents to conceptualize reality in many different ways are key to this issue. We will introduce our particular semantic modeling approach as well as the coupling of conceptual structures to the language system. We will justify the approach and show how these systems play together in the evolution of spatial language using humanoid robots. 1.

Semantic maps have offered linguists an appealing and empirically rooted methodology for describing recurrent structural patterns in language development and the multifunctionality of grammatical categories. Although some researchers argue that semantic maps are universal and given, others provide evidence that there are no fixed or universal maps. This paper takes the position that semantic maps are a useful way to visualize the grammatical evolution of a language (particularly the evolution of semantic structuring) but that this grammatical evolution is a consequence of distributed processes whereby language users shape and reshape their language. So it is a challenge to find out what these processes are and whether they indeed generate the kind of semantic maps observed for human languages. This work takes a design stance towards the question of the emergence of linguistic structure and investigates how grammar can be formed in populations of autonomous artificial “agents” that play “language games ” with each other about situations they perceive through a sensori-motor embodiment. The experiments reported here investigate whether semantic maps for case markers could emerge through grammaticalization processes without the need for a universal conceptual space.

Open-ended language communication remains an enormous challenge for autonomous robots. This paper argues that the notion of a language strategy is the appropriate vehicle for addressing this challenge. A language strategy packages all the procedures that are necessary for playing a language game. We present a specific example of a language strategy for playing an Action Game in which one robot asks another robot to take on a body posture (such as stand or sit), and show how it effectively allows a population of agents to self-organise a perceptually grounded ontology and a lexicon from scratch, without any human intervention. Next, we show how a new language strategy can arise by

Abstract. Artificial agents trying to achieve communicative goals in situated interactions in the real-world need powerful computational systems for conceptualizing their environment. In order to provide embodied artificial systems with rich semantics reminiscent of human language complexity, agents need ways of both conceptualizing complex compositional semantic structure and actively reconstructing semantic structure, due to uncertainty and ambiguity in transmission. Furthermore, the systems must be open-ended and adaptive and allow agents to adjust their semantic inventories in order to reach their goals. This paper presents recent progress in modeling open-ended, grounded semantics through a unified software system that addresses these problems. 1

In this paper, we propose a concrete operationalization which incorporates data from the FrameNet database into Fluid Construction Grammar, currently the only computational implementation of construction grammar that can achieve both production and parsing using the same set of constructions. As a proof of concept, we selected an annotated sentence from the FrameNet database and transcribed its frame annotation analysis into an FCG grammar. The paper illustrates the proposed constructions and discusses the value and results of these formalization efforts.

Abstract. This paper is part of an ongoing research program to understand the cognitive and functional bases for the origins and evolution of spatial language. Following a cognitive-functional approach, we first investigate the cross-linguistic variety in spatial language, with special attention for spatial perspective. Based on this language-typological data, we hypothesize which cognitive mechanisms are needed to explain this variety and argue for an interdisciplinary approach to test these hypotheses. We then explain how experiments in artificial language evolution can contribute to that and give a concrete example. 1

Abstract: Recent advances in web technologies and the availability of robust Lisp libraries supporting them have made it possible to think of new ways of understanding and debugging large applications. In this paper, we will discuss two basic ideas for assessing and verifying the behaviour of Lisp programs. First, we propose to use a web browser for graphically displaying debug output in a similar but more versatile way as the Lisp listener is normally used to print output traces. And second, we propose a method for creating HTML visualisations of complex data and control structures that don’t trade in level of detail for readability. We will introduce GTFL (a Graphical Terminal For Lisp), which we have implemented based on these two ideas, and discuss its applications. 1