A system approach to interactive learning in dialogue with a tutor

Introduction

In the EU FP7 project CogX we have developed a corious robot George; a complex heterogenuous distributed system for interactive learning of visual concepts in a dialogue with a tutor. Our objective was to demonstrate that a cognitive system can efficiently acquire conceptual models in an interactive learning process that is not overly taxing with respect to tutor supervision and is performed in an intuitive, user-friendly way.

Our approach

Our work focused on the integration of visual perception and processing of linguistic information by forming beliefs about the state of the world; these beliefs are then used in the learning process for updating the current representations. The system behaviour is driven by a motivation framework which facilitates different kinds of learning in a dialogue with a human teacher, including self-motivated learning, triggered by autonomous knowledge gap detection. George is based on a distributed asynchronous architecture depicted in the figure below.

Video

The video below shows the system after the second year of the project. It explains the main principles implemented in George. It describes the operation of the robot from a system perspective with the emphasis on three learning mechanisms and shows fragments of the corresponding mixed-initiative dialogue.