Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
Figure 8.16.
A robot arm and some blocks
C
A
D
G
B
E
F
However, even if language is about using words to achieve goals, it is sometimes
far from clear what those goals are, or how the words contribute to achieving them.
Consider a conversation like this:
“Hey! How is it going?”
“Not bad. Not bad. How about you?”
“Oh, could be worse. I can't wait for winter to be over.”
“You and me both!”
This kind of chit-chat could be ignored if it didn't make up such a large part of
language behavior. What is going on here appears to have little to do with details
about the weather (or the sport scores, or the latest celebrity scandal). It's much more
like a dance where the two parties exchange stylized moves and indicate a willingness
to act together. From an evolutionary point of view, it seems that language behavior
arose out of a strong desire for social interaction of this sort and that all the rest of it
(beyond the chit-chat) is more like an interesting offshoot.
Exercises
These exercises put what you have learned about natural language into practice in a
new domain. Imagine a robot that is capable of picking up and moving blocks located
on a table in front of it, as in figure 8.16.
The goal is to tell the robot what to do using ordinary English imperative sen-
tences like, “Pick up the pyramid beside the small green cube and put it directly in
front of the yellow block.” To interpret English sentences like these, you need to con-
struct a
world model
of facts about this world, a
lexicon
with all the necessary English
vocabulary, and a
parser/interpreter
to process the English expressions.
