language: en

Getting a Grip: A Computational Model of the Acquisition of Verb Semantics for Hand Actions

David Bailey
Computer Science Division, Univ. of California at Berkeley and International Computer Science Institute
1947 Center St. Suite 600, Berkeley CA 94704
dbailey@icsi.berkeley.edu

Abstract We present a computational model of how verbs might be learned within the limited domain of hand actions. We hypothesize that such verbs refer to the activities of underlying motor schemas, and leverage this constraint to build a system with strong enough biases that it can learn from a reasonably small number of examples, while still having adequate flexibility to learn the hand-action verbs of any language. The completed system should demonstrate its knowledge both by labelling its own behavior and by carrying out verbal commands in a simulated world.

1 Overview