Symbol Emergence through Interaction with Environment

Synthetic Approach to the Relationship between Embodiment and Symbol Generation

Abstract

This paper discusses a relationship between symbol emergence and embodiment. Symbol emergence is an alternative approach to overcome symbol grounding problem. We believe human beings' symbols constructed and held internally are originally based on our own embodiment. Therefore, autonomous social robots will also have to construct their own symbols by themselves. In addition to this, we have a nonlinear hypothesis about symbol emergence. To realize symbol emergence inside of autonomous robots, we propose Dual-Schemata model. This model enables an autonomous robot to generate its own symbols, called perceptional schemata, depending on its embodiment. In the end, we show that this symbol emergence has a nonlinear relationship with embodiment.