"What's my model inside of?": Exploring the role of environments for grounded natural language understanding

In contrast to classical cognitive science which studied brains in isolation, ecological approaches focused on the role of the body and environment in shaping cognition. Similarly, in this thesis we adopt an ecological approach to grounded natural language understanding (NLU) research. Grounded language understanding studies language understanding systems situated in the context of events, actions and precepts in naturalistic/simulated virtual environments. Where classic research tends to focus on designing new models and optimization methods while treating environments as given, we …

brains cognition cognitive cognitive science contrast cs.ai cs.cl cs.si environment environments inside language language understanding natural natural language nlu research role science studies thesis understanding