Language acquisition in humanoid robots

Jonas Hörnstein

Jonas Hörnstein Jonas Hörnstein is a PhD student at the VisLab - Computer and Robot Vision Lab within the Institute for Systems and Robotics at Instituto Superior Técnico.

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Date

• 14:00, Friday, November 6^th, 2009
• Room 336

Speaker

• Jonas Hörnstein, Institute for Systems and Robotics

Abstract

Unlike computer-based ASR-systems, infants are able to acquire impressive language skills from very little speech exposure. How they are able to do that is still an open question, but part of the answer may be found in the interaction between an infant and its caregiver. By using a humanoid robot it is possible to mimic this interaction in order to (i) investigate how much of linguistic structure that can be derived directly from the speech signal directed to infants and (ii) finding novel methods for language acquisition in a humanoid robot.