Grounding as Learning
Gregory M. Kobele, Jason Riggle, Travis C. Collier, Yoosook Lee, Ying Lin, Yuan Yao, CHARLES E. TAYLOR, Edward P. Stabler · eScholarship (California Digital Library) · 2003
This paper takes a first step toward bringing the tools of formal language theory to bear on this problem. In the first place, these tools easily reveal a number of grounding problems which are simply unsolvable with reasonable assumptions about the evidence available, and some problems that can be solved. In the second place, these tools provide a framework for exploring more sophisticated grounding strategies (Stabler et al., 2003). We explore here some preliminary ideas about how hypotheses about syntactic structure can interact with hypotheses about grounding in a fruitful way to provide a new perspective on the emergence of recursion in language. Simpler grounding methods look for some kind of correlation between the mere occurrence of particular basic generators and semantic elements, but richer hypotheses about relations among the generators themselves can provide valuable additional constraints on the problem