Symbol grounding through cumulative learning

Abstract. We suggest that the primary motivation for an agent to con-struct a symbol-meaning mapping is to solve a task. The meaning space of an agent should be derived from the tasks that it faces during the course of its lifetime. We outline a process in which agents learn to solve multiple tasks and extract a store of “cumulative knowledge ” that helps them to solve each new task more quickly and accurately. This cumulative knowledge then forms the ontology or meaning space of the agent. We suggest that by grounding symbols to this extracted cumu-lative knowledge agents can gain a further performance benefit because they can guide each others ’ learning process. In this version of the symbol grounding problem meanings cannot be directly communicated because they are internal to the agents, and they will be different for each agent. Also, the meanings may not correspond directly to objects in the envi-ronment. The communication process can also allow a symbol meaning mapping that is dynamic. We posit that these properties make this ver-sion of the symbol grounding problem realistic and natural. Finally, we discuss how symbols could be grounded to cumulative knowledge via a situation where a teacher selects tasks for a student to perform.