¿Es un plátano? Exploring the Application of a Physically Grounded Language Acquisition System to Spanish

Abstract

In this paper we describe a multilingual grounded language learning system adapted from an English-only system. This system learns the meaning of words used in crowd-sourced descriptions by grounding them in the physical representations of the objects they are describing. Our work presents a framework to compare the performance of the system when applied to a new language and to identify modifications necessary to attain equal performance, with the goal of enhancing the ability of robots to learn language from a more diverse range of people. We then demonstrate this system with Spanish, through first analyzing the performance of translated Spanish, and then extending this analysis to a new corpus of crowd-sourced Spanish language data. We find that with small modifications, the system is able to learn color, object, and shape words with comparable performance between languages.