Experiments with single-class support vector data descriptions as a tool for vocabulary grounding

This paper explores support vectors as a tool for vocabulary acquisition in robots. The intention is to investigate the language grounding process at the single-word stage. A social language grounding scenario is designed, where a robotic agent is taught the names of the objects by a human instructor. The agent grounds the names of these objects by associating them with their respective sensor-based category descriptions. A system for grounding vocabulary should be incremental, adaptive and support gradual evolution. A novel learning model based on single-class support vector data descriptions (SVDD), which conforms to these requirements, is presented. For robustness and flexibility, a kernel based implementation of support vectors was realized. For this purpose, a sigmoid kernel using histogram pyramid matching has been developed. The support vectors are trained based on an original approach using genetic algorithms. The model is tested over a series of semi-automated experiments and the results are reported.