MétaCan
Menu
Back to cohort
Record W2097173997 · doi:10.1080/09540090802091966

Flexible word meaning in embodied agents

2008· article· en· W2097173997 on OpenAlex

Why this work is in the frame

A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.

affAt least one author lists a Canadian institution in the pinned OpenAlex snapshot.

Bibliographic record

VenueConnection Science · 2008
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldSocial Sciences
TopicLanguage and cultural evolution
Canadian institutionsArtificial Intelligence in Medicine (Canada)
Fundersnot available
KeywordsComputer scienceMeaning (existential)GRASPEmbodied cognitionWord (group theory)Object (grammar)Artificial intelligenceSet (abstract data type)SituatedNatural language processingCognitive scienceLinguisticsPsychology

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

Learning the meanings of words requires coping with referential uncertainty – a learner hearing a novel word cannot be sure which aspects or properties of the referred object or event comprise the meaning of the word. Data from developmental psychology suggest that human learners grasp the important aspects of many novel words after just a few exposures, a phenomenon known as fast mapping. Traditionally, word learning is viewed as a mapping task, in which the learner has to map a set of forms onto a set of pre-existing concepts. We criticise this approach and argue instead for a flexible nature of the coupling between form and meanings as a solution to the problem of referential uncertainty. We implemented and tested the model in populations of humanoid robots that play situated language games about objects in their shared environment. Results show that the model can handle an exponential increase in uncertainty and allows scaling towards very large meaning spaces, while retaining the ability to grasp an operational meaning almost instantly for a great number of words. In addition, the model captures some aspects of the flexibility of form-meaning associations found in human languages. Meanings of words can shift between being very specific (names) and general (e.g. ‘small’). We show that this specificity is biased not by the model itself but by the distribution of object properties in the world.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

Full frame distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.001
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.001
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Observational · Consensus signal: none
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: Empirical
Teacher disagreement score0.440
Threshold uncertainty score0.915

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0010.001
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.001
Science and technology studies0.0010.000
Scholarly communication0.0000.001
Open science0.0000.000
Research integrity0.0000.000
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0000.000

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.081
GPT teacher head0.353
Teacher spread0.272 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it