SPEAKERS

Senior researcher at the Institute for language and speech processing at Athena research center

Title of Paper:
Embodied Knowledge Representation

Subdisciplinary Area: Computational Linguistics, Cognitive Systems

Keywords: knowledge representation, semantics, language, action, perception

Abstract: The need of structured knowledge for intelligent systems across domains and applications has led to the development of a number of knowledge bases and ontologies in the form of relational databases and semantic association networks. Neuroscience findings and theories point to a multisensory and distributed semantic memory in the human brain; however, from a cognitive perspective, our common sense knowledge bases and ontologies remain still static stores of mostly lexical concepts, with ad-hoc created semantic associations. From an engineering perspective, large-scale generalization and common-sense reasoning in intelligent systems and robotics still stumble on the semantic gap between high level symbolic representations and low level visuomotor experiences. In this presentation, we will show the PRAXICON, a dynamic, recursive and referential semantic network with biological basis that aims to address the representation and integration challenges of embodied and enactive cognition. We will focus particularly on its use in a diverse range of applications and domains including (a) teaching and learning in refugee camps (education), (b) embodied machine translation (Artificial Intelligence) and (c) improving the quality of life for patients with autism (mental disorders/Healthcare).