A proposal of a communication model combining symbolic representation and embodiment

Abstract

Human communication is mediated by symbolic (e.g., language) or quantitative (e.g., body movements) representations. %The two media are complementarily processed by different systems within the human. For smooth interaction between humans and machines, it is important for machines to have a mechanism to convert between symbolic and numerical representations. In this study, we construct a model in which the cognitive architecture as a symbol processing system and the robot as an embodied media interact with each other. In this model, we treat shiritori with a human as an example of a simple interaction. The conversion from a symbolic to a quantitative representation in this model corresponds to the robot's gesture based on the ``size image'' of a noun. The ``size image'' is a general human image of a word taken from the word distributed representation. In this framework, numerical representations influence symbolic processing as a buffer holding previous body movement effecteing on the next word choice.