Towards Avatars with Artificial Minds: Role of Semantic Memory.


2Julian Szymański, 2Tomasz Sarnatowicz and 1,2Wlodzislaw Duch,
School of Computer Engineering, 1Nanyang Technological University, Singapore,
and Department of Informatics, Nicolaus Copernicus University,
Grudziadzka 5, 87-100 Torun, Poland.

Abstract.

The first step towards creating avatars with human-like artificial minds is to give them human-like memory structures with an access to general knowledge about the world. This type of knowledge is stored in semantic memory. Although many approaches to modeling of semantic memories have been proposed they are not very useful in real life applications because they lack knowledge comparable to the common sense that humans have, and they cannot be implemented in a computationally efficient way. The most drastic simplification of semantic memory leading to the simplest knowledge representation that is sufficient for many applications is based on the Concept Description Vectors (CDVs) that store, for each concept, an information whether a given property is applicable to this concept or not. Unfortunately even such simple information about real objects or concepts is not available. Experiments with automatic creation of concept description vectors from various sources, including ontologies, dictionaries, encyclopedias and unstructured text sources are described. Haptek-based talking head that has an access to this memory has been created as an example of a humanized interface (HIT) that can interact with web pages and exchange information in a natural way. A few examples of applications of an avatar with semantic memory are given, including the twenty questions game and automatic creation of word puzzles.

Reference: Journal of Ubiquitous Computing and Intelligence, American Scientific Publishers (5/2006, in print)

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