MétaCan
Menu
Back to cohort
Record W2986406870 · doi:10.1145/3359618

Robots Learning to Say “No”

2019· article· en· W2986406870 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

VenueACM Transactions on Human-Robot Interaction · 2019
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldSocial Sciences
TopicLanguage and cultural evolution
Canadian institutionsUniversity of Waterloo
FundersEuropean Commission
KeywordsNegationLinguisticsPsychologyAffect (linguistics)Volition (linguistics)Language acquisitionSymbol (formal)Process (computing)Cognitive psychologyComputer scienceCognitive scienceCommunication

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

“No” is one of the first ten words used by children and embodies the first form of linguistic negation. Despite its early occurrence, the details of its acquisition remain largely unknown. The circumstance that “no” cannot be construed as a label for perceptible objects or events puts it outside the scope of most modern accounts of language acquisition. Moreover, most symbol grounding architectures will struggle to ground the word due to its non-referential character. The presented work extends symbol grounding to encompass affect and motivation. In a study involving the child-like robot iCub, we attempt to illuminate the acquisition process of negation words. The robot is deployed in speech-wise unconstrained interaction with participants acting as its language teachers. The results corroborate the hypothesis that affect or volition plays a pivotal role in the acquisition process. Negation words are prosodically salient within prohibitive utterances and negative intent interpretations such that they can be easily isolated from the teacher’s speech signal. These words subsequently may be grounded in negative affective states. However, observations of the nature of prohibition and the temporal relationships between its linguistic and extra-linguistic components raise questions over the suitability of Hebbian-type algorithms for certain types of language grounding.

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)0.000
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.000
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesInsufficient payload (model declined to judge)
Consensus categoriesInsufficient payload (model declined to judge)
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Not applicable · Consensus signal: none
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: Empirical
Teacher disagreement score0.873
Threshold uncertainty score0.993

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.000
Science and technology studies0.0010.000
Scholarly communication0.0000.001
Open science0.0000.000
Research integrity0.0000.000
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0080.008

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 head0.051
GPT teacher head0.379
Teacher spread0.328 · 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