Developmental Language Learning from Human/Humanoid Robot Social Interactions
This chapter presents work on developmental machine learning strategies applied to robots for language acquisition. The authors focus on learning by scaffolding and emphasize the role of the human caregiver for robot learning. Indeed, language acquisition does not occur in isolation, neither can it be a robot’s “genetic legacy.” Rather, they propose that language is best acquired incrementally, in a social context, through human-robot interactions in which humans guide the robot, as if it were a child, through the learning process. The authors briefly discuss psychological models related to this work and describe and discuss computational models that they implemented for robot language acquisition. The authors aim to introduce robots into our society and treat them as us, using child development as a metaphor for robots’ developmental language learning.