iCub Learns Words Like A Child

 


 Artificial Intelligence

AI embodied robots can develop basic language skills through interaction with a human, according to new results from researchers at the University of Hertfordshire. The researchers used the iCub platform to coordinate a series of studies that taught the robot in a similar way to how a parent would teach a child.

D r Caroline Lyon, Professor Chrystopher Nehaniv and Dr Joe Saunders have carried out experiments as part of the iTalk project with the childlike iCub humanoid robot to show how language learning emerges. The results of the experiments are published online in PLoS ONE. Initially the robot can only babble and perceives speech as a string of sounds, not divided up into words.

Named DeeChee, the robot is an iCub, a three-foot-tall open source humanoid machine designed to resemble a toddler. The similarity isn’t merely aesthetic, but has a functional purpose: many researchers think certain cognitive processes are shaped by the bodies in which they occur. This theory of artificial intelligence is known as embodiment.  Essentially, a brain isolated from the physical would think and learn very differently than a brain in a body.
During the study engaging in a few minutes of "conversation" with humans, in which the participants were instructed to speak to the iCub robot as if it were a small child, the robot adapted its output to the most frequently heard syllables to produce some word forms such as the names of simple shapes and colours.

Dr Lyon said: "It is known that infants are sensitive to the frequency of sounds in speech, and these experiments show how this sensitivity can be modelled and contribute to the learning of word forms by a robot."

The iTalk project teaches the robot to speak using methods similar to those used to teach children and is a key part in the learning process of the human-robot interaction. Although the iCub robot is learning to produce word forms, it does not know their meaning, and learning meanings is another part of the iTalk project's research. These scientific and technological advances could have a significant impact on the future generation of interactive robotic systems.





SOURCE  Science Daily

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