On the Computational Modeling of Meaning: Embodied Cognition Intertwined with Emotion
This document chronicles this author's attempt to explore how words come to mean what they do, with a particular focus on child language acquisition and what that means for models of language understanding.[I say historical because I synthesize the ideas based on when I discovered them and how those ideas influenced my later thinking.] I explain the setting for child language learning, how embodiment – being able to perceive and enact in the world, including knowledge of concrete and abstract concepts – is crucial, and how emotion and cognition relate to each other and the language learning process. I end with what I think are some of the requirements for a language-learning agent that learns language in a setting similar to that of children. This paper can act as a potential guide for ongoing and future work in modeling language.
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