Distributional models learn representations of words from text, but are criticized for their lack of grounding, or the linking of text to the non-linguistic world. Grounded language models have had success in learning to connect concrete categories like nouns and adjectives to the world via images and videos, but can struggle to isolate the meaning of the verbs themselves from the context in which they typically occur. In this paper, we investigate the extent to which trajectories (i.e. the position and rotation of objects over time) naturally encode verb semantics. We build a procedurally generated agent-object-interaction dataset, obtain human annotations for the verbs that occur in this data, and compare several methods for representation learning given the trajectories. We find that trajectories correlate as-is with some verbs (e.g., fall), and that additional abstraction via self-supervised pretraining can further capture nuanced differences in verb meaning (e.g., roll and slide).

Lexical semantics and cognitive science point to affordances (i.e. the actions that objects support) as critical for understanding and representing nouns and verbs. However, study of these semantic features has not yet been integrated with the ?foundation? models that currently dominate language representation research. We hypothesize that predictive modeling of object state over time will result in representations that encode object affordance information ?for free?. We train a neural network to predict objects? trajectories in a simulated interaction and show that our network?s latent representations differentiate between both observed and unobserved affordances. We find that models trained using 3D simulations outperform conventional 2D computer vision models trained on a similar task, and, on initial inspection, that differences between concepts correspond to expected features (e.g., roll entails rotation) . Our results suggest a way in which modern deep learning approaches to grounded language learning can be integrated with traditional formal semantic notions of lexical representations.

We introduce a new dataset for training and evaluating grounded language models. Our data is collected within a virtual reality environment and is designed to emulate the quality of language data to which a pre-verbal child is likely to have access: That is, naturalistic, spontaneous speech paired with richly grounded visuospatial context. We use the collected data to compare several distributional semantics models for verb learning. We evaluate neural models based on 2D (pixel) features as well as feature-engineered models based on 3D (symbolic, spatial) features, and show that neither modeling approach achieves satisfactory performance. Our results are consistent with evidence from child language acquisition that emphasizes the difficulty of learning verbs from naive distributional data. We discuss avenues for future work on cognitively-inspired grounded language learning, and release our corpus with the intent of facilitating research on the topic.

The fields of cognitive science and philosophy have proposed many different theories for how humans represent “concepts”. Multiple such theories are compatible with state-of-the-art NLP methods, and could in principle be operationalized using neural networks. We focus on two particularly prominent theories–Classical Theory and Prototype Theory–in the context of visually-grounded lexical representations. We compare when and how the behavior of models based on these theories differs in terms of categorization and entailment tasks. Our preliminary results suggest that Classical-based representations perform better for entailment and Prototype-based representations perform better for categorization. We discuss plans for additional experiments needed to confirm these initial observations.