Direct and Inverse Inference in Music Databases: How to Make a Song Funk?

We propose an algorithm for exploiting statisticalproperties of large-scale metadata databases about musictitles to answer musicological queries. We introduce twoinference schemes called “direct” and “inverse” inference,based on an efficient implementation of a kernelregression approach. We describe an evaluationexperiment conducted on a large-scale database of fine-grained musical metadata. We use this database to trainthe direct inference […]

Flexible Word Meanings in Embodied Agents

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 […]

The Robot in the Mirror

Humans maintain a body image of themselves, which plays a central role in controlling bodily movement, planning action, recognising and naming actions performed by others, and requesting or executing commands. This paper explores through experiments with autonomous humanoid robots how such a body image could form. Robots play a situated embodied language game called the […]

The Symbol Grounding Problem Has Been Solved. So What’s Next?

This chapter briefly discusses the issues of symbols, meanings, and embodiment. It explains the solution to the symbol grounding problem. It illustrates the ingredients that are employed in the experiments about language emergence using a specific example of a color guessing game. It argues that these experiments show that there is an effective solution to […]