Symbol Emergence in Robotics: From Cognition to Language

This book presents a pioneering exploration of symbol and language emergence in cognitive systems.This novel research field, primarily developed by Japanese research groups, investigates the relationship between embodied cognition and language, centered around the concept of symbol emergence systems. In the era of Large Language Models, understanding the roots and underlying mechanisms of language emergence is gaining attention.This book provides fresh insights by surveying cognitive developmental robotics and symbol emergence in robotics, focusing on language acquisition, concept formation, and symbol/language emergence in multi-agent systems. The work addresses the symbol grounding problem in AI and cognitive science, arguing that it is an artificial construct.Instead, it posits the symbol emergence problem as a fundamentally important problem.Following this perspective, the book introduces constructive studies on robots acquiring language, covering developmental robotics, unsupervis