Teaching Language to a Robot

Posted 19 Jun 2002 at 00:39 UTC by The Swirling Brain

An article by National Geographic talks about teaching language to a robot. In some of the experiments they used a modified AIBO.

But what are they really learning?, posted 19 Jun 2002 at 05:30 UTC by Pontifier » (Apprentice)

These systems might be learning language, but they may be entirely off the subject. I remeber watching a show(I think it was "robot's rising" but not sure) where the talked about machine learning. One of the segments in the show was about a neural net that was supposed to look for tanks in aerial photos. They showed it lots of pictures, and told it if there were tanks or not. It seened to work well, but when they tested it with a new set of pictures it did horribly because in the pictures they used to train it, pictures with tanks were taken on a sunny day, and pictures without tanks were taken on a cloudy day. The neural net had decided it was supposed to be looking for cloud shaddows.
Makes me wonder if the researcher always used the same hand to point to smiley, and if that's why the aibo thought the new ball was smiley. Perhaps Poo-chi is smiley now.
Every time I think about AI my mind boggs down with the complexity of the data it would take to make a human equivelant memory/object recognition system.

tongue tight Americans, posted 19 Jun 2002 at 19:27 UTC by evilrobots » (Observer)

I believe they should be teaching tongue tight Americans first.

Happy talking, posted 19 Jun 2002 at 19:36 UTC by motters » (Master)

The tanks example is typical of many object recognition systems. Object recognition is really a key problem, but despite a lot of research a general solution still remains elusive. Having a conversation is a relatively trivial task provided that you can visually identify the things which are being talked about.
- Bob

Neat!, posted 19 Jun 2002 at 23:39 UTC by scienceboy2 » (Journeyer)

That sounds cool! I knew this would happen someday, but never in my 12 wonderful years of being a human life-form in this galaxy did I dream of it happening this soon. How soon can I get this stuff for MY robot? That is really awesome.

AIBO teaches people to YAWN, posted 20 Jun 2002 at 00:47 UTC by The Swirling Brain » (Master)

AIBO in the news again... YAWN!

WOW THATS AWSOME, posted 26 Jun 2002 at 18:43 UTC by nitro » (Journeyer)

I REALY LOOK UP TO YOU IF YOU GUYS ARE MAKING ANOTHER I WOULD LIKE TO HELP OUT I LIKED HOW YOU GUYS SET IT UP AND EVERY THING YOU ARE A REAL INSPIRATION THANKS