Dialog with Robots: Papers from the AAAI Fall Symposium (FS-10-05)

Robots That Learn to Communicate:
A Developmental Approach to Personally and Physically Situated
Human-Robot Conversations *Naoto Iwahashi1, Komei Sugiura1, Ryo Taguchi2, Takayuki Nagai3, Tadahiro Taniguchi4
1

National Institute of Information and Communications Technology, Seika-cho, Kyoto, Japan
2
Nagoya Institute of Technology, Nagoya, Aichi, Japan
3
University of Electro-Communications, Chofu, Tokyo, Japan
4
Ritsumeikan University, Kusatsu, Shiga, Japan

with other people, and the meanings of utterances areembedded in these shared experiences. Therefore, language
processing methods must make it possible to reflect sharedexperiences.
However, existing language processing methods, which
are characterized by fixed linguistic knowledge, do notmake this possible (Allen et al. 2001). In these methods,
information is represented and processed by symbols
whose meaning has been predefined by the machines’
developers. Therefore, experiences shared by a user and amachine under personal situations in the physical world
can neither be expressed nor interpreted. As a result, users
and robots fail to interact in a way that accurately reflects
shared experiences.
To overcome this problem and to achieve natural dialog
between humans and robots, we should use methods thatsatisfy the following requirements in terms of beliefs therobots have:

Abstract
This paper summarizes the online machine learning method
LCore, which enables robots to learn to communicate withusers from scratch through verbal and behavioral interactionin the physical world. LCore combines speech, visual, andtactile information obtained through the interaction, andenables robots to learn beliefs regarding speech units, words,
the concepts of objects, motions, grammar, and pragmaticand communicative capabilities. The overall belief system isrepresented by a dynamic graphical model in an integrated
way. Experimental results show that through a small,practical number of learning episodes with a user, the robot
was eventually able to understand even fragmental andambiguous utterances, respond to them with confirmationquestions and/or actions, generate directive utterances, andanswer questions, appropriately for the given situation. This
paper discusses the importance of a developmental approachto realize personally and physically situated human-robot
conversations.

1) Grounding: Beliefs that robots have must be groundedin the personal physical world. Hence, linguistic beliefs
should be represented by an integrated system, including
other cognitive beliefs regarding perception, actions, andso on. The theoretical framework for grounding
language was presented in the Reference (Roy 2005).
Several computational studies have explored thegrounding of the meanings of utterances inconversations in the physical world (Winograd 1972;
Shapiro et al. 2000). These previous works, however,
have not pursued the learning of new grounded beliefs.

Introduction
In order to support human activities in everyday life, robots
should adapt their behavior in response to situations which
differ from user to user. One of the essential features ofsuch adaptation is the ability of a robot to shareexperiences with the user in the physical world. Thisability should be considered in terms of spoken language
communication, which is one of the most natural interfaces.
The process of human communication is based on
certain beliefs shared by those communicating (Sperber &Wilson 1995). Language is one such shared belief that isused to convey meanings based on its relevance to othershared beliefs. These shared beliefs are formed based on
sharing interactive experiences with the environment and2) Scalability: The situation in interactions between a user
and a robot changes continuously. To enable robots to
execute linguistic communication appropriately in a newsituation, grounded linguistic beliefs should betransmutable and scalable. Robots themselves must beable to learn new beliefs that reflect their experiences.

*
This research was partially supported by the Ministry of
Education, Science, Sports and Culture, Grant-in-Aid for
Scientific Research (C), 20500186, 2010.
Copyright © 2010, Association for the Advancement of Artificial
Intelligence (www.aaai.org). All rights reserved.

383) Sharing: Because utterances are processed on the basisof the beliefs assumed to be shared by a user and a robot,
the grounded beliefs, which are learned, should beshared. To form such shared beliefs, the robot should
possess a mechanism that enables the user and the robot
to infer the state of each other’s belief systems in anatural way by coordinating their utterances and actions.
All these requirements show that learning ability isessential. Cognitive activities related to grounding,scalability, and sharing can be observed clearly in theprocess of language acquisition by infants as well as ineveryday conversation by adults. Therefore, we have beendeveloping a method that enables robots to acquire
linguistic communication capabilities from scratch throughverbal and nonverbal interaction with users, instead of
directly pursuing language processing.
Language acquisition by machines has been attracting
interest in various research fields, and several pioneeringstudies have developed algorithms based on inductive
learning using sets of pairs, where each pair consists of aword sequence and nonlinguistic information about its
meaning. In several studies, visual, rather than symbolic,information was given as nonlinguistic information (Dyer& Nenov 1993; Regier 1997). Spoken-word acquisition
algorithms based on unsupervised clustering of speechtokens have also been described (Gorin et al. 1994;
Nakagawa & Masukata 1995; Roy & Pentland 2002).
Steels examined the socially interactive process of
evolving grounded linguistic knowledge shared bycommunication agents from the viewpoint of game theory
and a complex system (Steels 2003).
In contrast, the method (Iwahashi 2007; Iwahashi 2008)
described in this paper, which is called LCore, satisfies theabove-mentioned three requirements simultaneously andfocuses on online learning of personally situated language
use through verbal and nonverbal interaction with a user inthe real physical world. LCore applies information fromraw speech and visual observations and tactile
reinforcement in an integrated way, and enables a robot tolearn incrementally and online beliefs regarding speech
units, words, concepts of objects, motions, grammar, andpragmatic and communicative capabilities.
A robot’s belief system, encompassing these beliefs, isrepresented by a dynamic graphical model that has astructure reflecting the state of the user’s belief system;
therefore, learning makes it possible for the user and therobot to infer the state of each other’s belief systems.
Based on this belief system, LCore enables the robot tounderstand even fragmentary and ambiguous utterances ofusers, respond to them with confirmation questions and/or
actions, generate directive utterances, and answer questions,appropriately for a given situation.
In particular, LCore enables the robot to learn thesecapabilities with relatively little interaction. This feature isalso important because a typical user will not tolerate
extended interaction with a robot that cannot communicate,and situations in actual everyday conversation change
continuously.

Figure 1: Robotic platform and its interaction with user.

Learning Setting
The spoken-language acquisition task discussed in thisstudy was set up as follows: We performed experiments
using the robotic platform shown in Fig. 1. The robot
consisted of a manipulator with seven degrees of freedom(DOFs), a four-DOF multi-fingered grasper, a head unit, adirectional microphone, a speaker, a stereo vision camera,
and an infrared sensor. The head unit moved to indicate
whether its gaze was directed at the user or at an object. A
touch sensor was attached to the robot’s hand for inputtinga tactile reinforcement signal. A user and the robot lookedat and moved the objects on the table shown as Fig. 1.
Initially, the robot did not possess any linguisticknowledge or concepts regarding the specific objects andthe way in which they could be moved. First, to help therobot learn speech units, the user spoke for approximately
one minute. Then, interactions were carried out to learn
words, concepts of objects, motions, grammar, andpragmatic and communicative capabilities. Here, thecommunicative capability means that of understanding thetype of the speech act of a user’s utterance, and selecting
an appropriate response from among moving an object,
pointing at an object, and uttering an answer. The learning
episodes for them could be carried out alternately, andwere as follows:
Concepts of objects and words referring them: The user
pointed to an object on the table while uttering a word
describing it. The objects used included boxes, stuffed
and wooden toys, and balls.
Motions and words referring them: The user moved an
object while uttering a word describing the motion1.
Grammar: The user moved an object while uttering asentence describing the action, such as “Place-on small
frog green box” 2 . Note that function words were notused because the learning method could not learn them.
Pragmatic capability: Using an utterance and a gesture,
the user asked the robot to move an object, and the robot
responded. If the robot responded incorrectly, the user
slapped the robot’s hand 3. The robot also asked the user
to move an object, and the user acted in response.
1

The utterance is restricted to a word in each episode for learning an
object and motion..
2
Utterances made in Japanese have been translated into English in thispaper.
3
The physical retribution was used rather than an utterance, e.g. “no thatis incorrect”, because the robot has not learned such utterance.

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Communicative capability: The user asked the robot to
do something. If the robot did not respond correctly, theuser indicated the correct response by moving or
pointing at an objector, or uttered an answer.

Learning Method
Speech Units
Speech is a time-continuous one-dimensional signal. A
robot learns statistical models of speech units from suchsignals without being provided with transcriptions ofphoneme sequences or boundaries between phonemes. The
difficulty of learning speech units is ascribed to thedifficulties involved in speech segmentation, the clusteringof speech segments into speech units, and the decision on
the number of the speech units. For these difficulties, themethods based on unsupervised learning of speech unit
HMMs were proposed (Iwahashi 2003; Iwahashi 2008).

Figure 2: Scene example in which utterances were madeand understood.
time an object image is given. Moreover, this concept is
extended to multimodal representation including visual,tactile, and acoustic features based on a bag of featuresmodel (Nakamura et al. 2007) .
Abstract Meanings in Terms of Objects. Here, we
consider words that refer to concepts that are more abstract
and that are not formed directly from perceptual
information, such as “tool,” “food,” and “pet.” In a study
on the abstract nature of the meanings of symbols (SavageRumbaugh 1986), it was found that chimpanzees could
learn the lexigrams (graphically represented words) thatrefer to both individual object categories (e.g., “banana,”“apple,” “hammer,” and “key”) and the functions (“tool”
and “food”) of the objects.
A method that enables robots to gain this ability has
been proposed (Nakamura et al. 2009). In this method, themovements that are given to the objects are taken as theobjects’ functions. Learning is based on the statisticalmodel selection using the variational Bayes method.
Motions. While words that refer to objects are nominal,
words that refer to motions are relational. The concept ofthe motion of a moving object is represented by a timevarying spatial relationship between a trajector and alandmark based on cognitive linguistics (Langacker 1991).
The trajector is an entity characterized as the figure withina relational profile, and the landmark is entity
characterized as the ground that provides a point ofreference for locating the trajectory. Therefore, the conceptof the trajectory of an object depends on perspective. In
Fig. 2, for example, the trajectory of the stuffed toy on theleft moved by the user, as indicated by the white arrow, isunderstood as move over and place on when the landmarks
are considered to be the stuffed toy in the middle and thebox on the right, respectively.
In general, however, information about what is alandmark is not obtained in learning data. The learning
method must infer the landmark selected by a user in eachscene. In addition, the type of intrinsic coordinate systemin the space should also be inferred to appropriately
represent the graphical model for each concept of motion.
A method that can solve this problem is proposed in the
References (Haoka & Iwahashi 2000; Sugiura & Iwahashi2008). In this method, the concept of a motion isrepresented by a HMM. Landmarks and intrinsic
coordinate systems are considered to be latent variables,
and they are inferred using an expectation maximization

Words
To learn words, static or moving images of objects andspeech describing them are used. The lexicon consists of aset of lexical items, and each lexical item consists ofstatistical models of a spoken word and a concept. The
statistical models of spoken words are represented by the
concatenation of the speech units. The words are
categorized into the following three types: 1) those thatrefer to perceptual characteristics of objects, such as blue,
big, apple, and Kermit, 2) those that refer to abstract
meanings in terms of objects, such as tool and food, and 3)
those that refer to motions, such as place on and move up.
Perceptual Characteristics of Objects. In general, thedifficulty of acquiring words that refer to objects can be
ascribed to the difficulties involved in specifying featuresand extending them to other objects.
We proposed an interactive learning method that mainly
addresses the problem of extension (Iwahashi 2008). The
robot decides whether the input word is one in its
vocabulary (a known word) or not (an unknown word). If
the robot judges that the input word is an unknown word, it
registers it in its vocabulary. This decision is made using
both speech and visual information about the objects.
In addition, we proposed a learning method that allows
sentence utterances, which consists of unknown words,
instead of words as speech input (Taguchi et al. 2009). In
the method, in order to obtain a lexicon, a statistical modelof the joint probability of a spoken utterance and an object
is learned based on the minimum description lengthprinciple. This model consists of a list of the phoneme
sequences of words and three statistical models, namely, asentence acoustic model, a word bigram model, and a wordmeaning model. By this method, words were learned with
84% phoneme accuracy.
The model for each image category is represented by amultidimensional Gaussian function in a twelve
dimensional visual feature space (in terms of shape, color,and size), and it is learned using a Bayesian method every

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(EM) algorithm. By this method, each motion concept
could be learned by showing about five different
movements. The trajectory for the motion referred to by amotion word is generated by maximizing the output
probability of the learned HMM, given the positions of a
trajector and a landmark.

GrammarTo learn grammar, moving images of actions and speech
describing them are used. The robot should detect thecorrespondence between a semantic structure in themoving image and a syntactic structure in the speech.
However, such semantic and syntactic structures are notobservable. While an enormous number of structures canbe extracted from a moving image and speech, the methodshould select those with the most appropriate
correspondence between them. Grammar is statisticallylearned using such correspondences, and is then inversely
used to extract the correspondence.
It is assumed that each utterance is generated on thebasis of stochastic grammar, based on a conceptual
structure. The conceptual structure used here is a basic
schema that is applied in cognitive linguistics. The word
sequence of utterance s is interpreted as a conceptual
structure z = [(z1, Wz1), (z2, Wz2), (z3, Wz3)], where zi
represents the attribute of a phrase and has a value among{M, T, L}. WM, WT, WL represent the phrases describing a
motion, a trajector, and a landmark, respectively. For
example, when the image is the same as that shown in Fig.
2, and the corresponding utterance is “Place-on small frog
brown box,” then the utterance is interpreted as follows:[(M, place-on), (T, small frog), (L, brown box)].
The grammar is a statistical language model that isrepresented by a set of occurrence probabilities for the
possible orders of attributes in the conceptual structure,and is learned using Bayesian method.

Figure 3: Belief system of robot for pragmatic capability.
The following is an example of generating andunderstanding utterances based on the assumption ofshared beliefs. Suppose that in the scene shown in Fig. 2,
the frog on the left has just been put on a table. If the user
in the figure wants to ask the robot to place a frog on thebox, he may say, “Place-on frog box.” In this situation, if
the user assumes that the robot shares the belief that theobject moved in the previous action is likely to be the next
target for movement and the belief that the box is likely tobe something for the object to be placed on, he might justsay “Place-on 1 .” To understand this fragmentary andambiguous utterance, the robot must possess similar beliefs.
If the user knows that the robot has responded by doing
what he asked it to, this knowledge would strengthen his
confidence that the beliefs he assumed to be shared arereally shared. It can be understood that the former
utterance is more effective than the latter utterance intransmitting the meaning of the utterance, while the latterutterance is more effective than the former utterance intransmitting information about the state of belief systems.
Conversely, when the robot wants to ask the user to dosomething, the beliefs that it assumes to be shared are usedin the same way.
We have proposed the method which copes with theabove difficulty (Iwahashi 2003; Iwahashi 2007). In themethod, robot’s belief system has a structure that reflects
the state of the user’s belief system so that the user and therobot infer the state of each other’s belief systems (Fig. 3).
This structure consists of the following two parts:
1) Shared belief function (SBF), which models theassumption of shared beliefs and consists of a set ofbelief modules with values (the local confidence vector)
that represent the degree of confidence that each belief isshared by the robot and the user. The beliefs used arethose that concern speech, motions, static images ofobjects, behavioral context, and motion-object
relationships. The output of this function is the sum of
the outputs of all belief modules weighted by the local

Pragmatic Capability
The meanings of utterances are conveyed based on certain
beliefs shared by those communicating in the situations.
When a participant interprets an utterance based on his/her
assumptions that certain beliefs are shared and isconvinced, based on certain clues, that the interpretation iscorrect, he/she gains confidence that the beliefs are shared.
On the other hand, because the sets of beliefs assumed to
be shared by participants actually often containdiscrepancies, the more beliefs a listener needs tounderstand an utterance, the greater is the risk that thelistener will misunderstand it.
As mentioned above, a pragmatic capability of the robot
relies on the capability to infer the state of a user’s belief
system. Therefore, the method should enable the robot toadapt its assumption of shared beliefs rapidly and robustly
through verbal and nonverbal interaction. The methodshould also control the balance between (i) thetransmission of the meanings of utterances and (ii) thetransmission of information about the state of belief
systems in the process of generating utterances.

1

Although use of a pronoun might be more natural than deletion of nounphrases in some languages, the same ambiguity in meaning exists in bothsuch expressions.

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confidence vector, and it represents the degree ofcorrespondence between an utterance and an action.
2) Global confidence function (GCF), which represents
the estimation of the difference between the sharedbeliefs assumed by the robot, i.e., SBF, and the sharedbeliefs assumed by the user. GCF is represented by asigmoid function, and it outputs an estimate of theprobability that the speaker’s utterance will be correctly
understood by the listener.
Through the interactive episodes, the robot canincrementally learn all the parameters of this belief system
online. The parallel structure of SBF with minimum
classification error and Bayesian learning methods canmake the learning of the belief system fast. Using thesefunctions, the robot can understand the user’s fragmental
and ambiguous directive utterances, respond to them byacting, and generate confirmation questions, if necessary.
In addition, a method that detects users’ robot-directedspeech has been proposed based on pragmatic capability(Zuo et al. 2010).
Utterance understanding by robot. Given an utterance,
the optimum action is that which maximizes the output of
SBF. When the user utters directives to get the robot tomove an object, the robot can move in response even if theutterances are fragmental and ambiguous. In experiments,
approximately 80% in correct understanding rate wasachieved for such fragmental utterances through about
ninety episodes. An example of action generated as a resultof a correct understanding of the user’s utterance “Placeon” is shown in Fig. 4, along with the second action
candidates. Output log-probabilities obtained from thebelief modules weighted by the local confidence vector
are also shown. It was found that nonlinguistic beliefs wereused appropriately in understanding the utterance based on
its relevance to the situation.
Utterance generation by robot. Because GCF outputs theestimate of the probability that a speaker’s utterance will
be correctly understood by a listener, the robot can control
the ambiguity of its utterances. Hence, the robot canfacilitate the formation of shared beliefs between a user
and itself by adjusting the risk of being misunderstood inorder to enable the user and the robot to infer each other’s
inner state (Nakamura et al. 2009).
In addition, the robot can generate confirmationutterances if it decides that the user’s utterances are too
ambiguous to execute an action immediately. Thisdecision-making is based on expected utility (Sugiura et al.
2009). The optimum response can be selected based on thethreshold T of the output of the GCF of the optimum
action.
An example of executed dialogue is shown in Fig. 5.
Because the output of the GCF of the optimum action wasless than T , a confirmation utterance was the optimum
response. Therefore, the robot first asked whether “greenbox” was the trajector. Here, the word “green” was used todescribe the major difference between Object 2 (green box)
and Object 3 (blue box). In the second confirmationutterance, the word “blue” was inserted into the segment

Figure 4: An example of action generated as a result ofcorrect understanding of utterance “Place-on” and weighted
output log-probability from belief modules, along withsecond choices.

[Situation: Object 2 was manipulated most recently]
U: “Move-closer box Elmo.”
R: “Move-closer green box?”
U: “No.”
R: “Move-closer blue box?”
U: “Yes.”
R: (The robot moves Object 3 closer to Object 1.)

Figure 5: Dialog example. Motion executed withconfirmation utterances. The correct action is to move
Object 3 (blue box) closer to Object 1 (red stuffed toy).
WT. In contrast, the landmark was not mentioned in either
generated utterance, because no word insertion to WL had alarge influence on the GCF output.

Communicative Capability
In previous subsections, we have described theprocessing of directive utterances. So that the robot cancommunicate with users more naturally, however, it shouldclassify users’ utterances into one of the types of speechacts in order to respond to them appropriately. The
proposed learning method (Taguchi et al. 2009) enables
the robot to return suitable utterances to a human or toperform actions by learning the meanings of interrogative
words, such as “what” and “which.” The meanings of thesewords are grounded in communication and stimulate
specific responses from a listener. The method learns therelationship between the user utterances and the robot
responses. Hence, the robot can select any of the following
responses to users’ utterances: moving an object, pointing
at an object, or answering by an utterance. For example, a42

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user asks “What place-on?” after he has placed an apple on
a box. In this case, the robot can answer “Apple.”

Conclusion and Future Work
This paper described our developmental approach toward
personally and physically situated human-robot
conversations. The communication learning method LCore
based on the approach satisfies three major requirementsthat existing language processing methods cannot, namely,
grounding, scalability, and sharing.
Finally, we suggest solving two challenging problems
for future work. The first is bridging the gap between
nonlinguistic and linguistic computational processes incommunication, which at present are completely different.
A key to solving this problem could be role reversal
imitation (Carpenter et al. 2005; Taniguchi et al. 2010),
which is a basis of communication learning. The second
problem is to enable learning of the displaced language in
addition to language grounded in the physical world. To
solve this problem, developing a computational mechanism
for metaphors is essential.

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