Cognitive Semantics and Cognitive Theories of Representation

Master's Program in Cognitive Science, Univ. Bratislava

Winter semester 2010/11

Lecturer: Mgr. Dana Retová., Dept. of Applied Informatics, room I-11, r e t o v a (at) i i . f m p h . u n i b a . s k
Time/Place: room I-8, Thursday 14:00, 4h/w
Credits: 5

Indicative Content

The goal of the course is to formulate questions and provide views from literature helping to understand how cognitive systems manipulate with meanings. Also, to present cognitive theories of representation bridging the gaps between brain, language and culture.

Assessment

Seminar 70% (readings, discussions, activity)
Oral exam 30%

Schedule

(The list of readings and other resources will be updated on the way.)

Session	Date	Topic	Seminar Readings	Moderated by	Supplementary Resources
1.	Sept 30	Introduction & basic terminology	(none)	-	Takác(, M.: Construction of Meanings in Living and Artificial Agents. dissertation thesis, Comenius University, Bratislava, 2007, pages 22-31.
2.	Oct 7	Semiotics and enactive approach	Nehaniv, C.: The making of meaning in societies: Semiotic and information theoretic background to the evolution of communication. In: Edmonds, B., Dautenhahn, K.(Eds.), Proceedings of the AISB 2000 Symposium: Starting from Society – the Application of Social Analogies to Computational Systems. AISB, pp.73 –84.	Christian	Ziemke & Sharkey (2001). A stroll through the worlds of robots and animals: Applying Jakob von Uexküll's theory of meaning to adaptive robots and artificial life. Semiotica, 134(1-4), 701-746.
3.	Oct 14	Meaning in animal world: evolutionary view	Kovác(, L: Fundamental principles of cognitive biology. Evolution and Cognition 6, 51-69, 2000.	Thomas	Gärdenfors, P.: Cued and detached representations in animal cognition", Behavioural Processes 36, 1996, pp. 263-273. Gärdenfors, P.: "Language and the evolution of cognition", in Penser l'esprit: Des sciences de la cognition à une philosophie cognitive, ed. by V. Rialle and D. Fisette, Presses Universitaires de Grenoble, Grenoble, 1996, pp. 151-172. Gärdenfors, P.: Cooperation and the Evolution of Symbolic Communication. In D. Kimbrough Oller and Ulrike Griebel, editors, Evolution of Communication Systems: A Comparative Approach, (2004), pages 237-256. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
4.	Oct 21	Biologically motivated semantics of distinguishing criteria	Šefránek, J.: Knowledge Representation for Animal Reasoning. In: Honkela, T., Pöllä, M., Paukkeri, M., Simula, O. (eds.): Proceedings of AKRR '08, the 2nd International and Interdisciplinary Conference on Adaptive Knowledge Representation and Reasoning, Espoo, Finland, 2008, pp. 65-72.	Martin K.	Takác(, M.: mindmap for Šefránek, J.: Cognition without mental processes Takác(, M.: Cognitive Semantics for Dynamic Environments. In: Hitzler, P., Schärfe, H., P. Øhrstrøm (eds.): Contribution to ICCS 2006 - 14th International Conference on Conceptual Structures. Aalborg University Press, Aalborg, Denmark, 2006, pp. 202-215.
5.	Oct 28	Cognitive semantics of Lakoff	Lakoff, George (1987). Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, Foreward and chap. 1 and 4-6. Love metaphors	Martin K.	Šefránek, J.: slide notes for Lakoff's Women, Fire and Dangerous Things
6.	Nov 4	Conceptual spaces	Gärdenfors, P.: Concept representations and nonmonotonic inferences. pp. 25-39 in Logic for a Change: Essays dedicated to Sten Lindström on the occasion of his fiftieth birthday, Uppsala Prints and Preprints in Philosophy 1995:9, Uppsala. Revised version in Mathware & Soft Computing 3, pp. 17-31.	Simon M.	Gärdenfors, P.: "Symbolic, conceptual and subconceptual representations", pp. 255-270 in Human and Machine Perception: Information Fusion, ed. by V. Cantoni, V. di Gesù, A. Setti and D. Tegolo, Plenum Press, New York, 1997. Gärdenfors, P.: 1996i "Conceptual spaces as a basis for cognitive semantics", in Philosophy and Cognitive Science, ed. by A. Clark et al., Kluwer, Dordrecht, 1996, pp. 159-180. Gärdenfors, P.:"Meanings as conceptual structures", in Mindscapes: Philosophy, Science, and the Mind, ed. by M. Carrier and P. Machamer, Pittsburgh University Press, Pittsburgh, 1997, pp. 61-86.
7.	Nov 11	Brain related semantics	Barsalou, L.: Perceptual Symbol Systems, Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 22, 1999, pp. 577-609.	Thomas M.	Barsalou, L.W. (2008). Grounded cognition. Annual Review of Psychology, 59, 617-645. F. Pulvermüller: Words in the brain's language. Behav Brain Sci, Vol. 22, No. 2. (April 1999). Neural Basis of Language 2004, ICSI U Berkeley (local copy)
8.	Nov 18	Toward grammar	Bergen, B. & Chang, N.: Embodied Construction Grammar in Simulation-Based Language Understanding. In J.-O. Östman and M. Fried (eds.), Construction Grammar(s): Cognitive and Cross-Language Dimensions. Johns Benjamins, 2005. (Reprinted in V. Evans, B. Bergen and J. Zinken (eds.), The Cognitive Linguistics Reader. Equinox. 2007.	Simon M.	N. Chang, J. Feldman, R. Porzel, and K. Sanders (2002). Scaling Cognitive Linguistics: Formalisms for Language Understanding.
9.	Nov 25	Meaning in Artificial Systems: Basic Problems	Harnad, S. (1990) The Symbol Grounding Problem. Physica D 42: 335-346. Harnad, S. (1993) Grounding Symbols in the Analog World with Neural Nets. Think 2(1) 12 - 78 Ziemke, T.: Rethinking Grounding In: Riegler, Peschl & von Stein (eds.) Understanding Representation in the Cognitive Sciences (pp. 177-190). Plenum Press: New York.	Christian P.	Turing, A. M., 1950. Computing machinery and intelligence. Mind 59, 433–460. Searle, J. R., 1980. Minds, brains, and programs. Behavioural and Brain Sciences 3, 417–457. Newell, A., Simon, H. A., 1976. Computer science as empirical inquiry: Symbols and search. Commun. ACM 19 (3), 113–126. Fodor J. A. and Pylyshyn Z. W.: Connectionism and Cognitive Architecture: A Critical Analysis. In: Connections and symbols. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, pp. 3–71. 1988. Ziemke: Construction
10.	Dec 2	Meaning in Artificial Systems: Case Studies	(one of): Wiedermann, J: HUGO: A Cognitive Architecture with an Incorporated World Model, Technical report CSAV No. 966, April 2006 Deb Roy. (2008, in press). A Mechanistic Model of Three Facets of Meaning. Chapter to appear in Symbols, Embodiment, and Meaning, de Vega, Glenberg, and Graesser, eds. pdf Brooks, R: Intelligence without representation. Artificial Intelligence, Vol.47, 1991, pp.139-159. Cohen, P. R. (1998). Dynamic Maps as Representations of Verbs. Proc. of the 13^th Biennial European Conference on Artificial Intelligence. New York: John Wiley & Sons. <>survey of chatbots	tba	Vernon D., Metta G., Sandini G.: A Survey of Artificial Cognitive Systems: Implications for the Autonomous Development of Mental Capabilities in Computational Agents. Evolutionary Computation, IEEE Transactions on, Vol. 11, No. 2. (2007), pp. 151-180. Takác(, M.: Construction of Meanings in Living and Artificial Agents. dissertation thesis, Comenius University, Bratislava, submitted in August 2007, Chapter 4.
11.	Dec 9	Constructivist Approach	L.Smith and M. Gasser [2005]. The Development of Embodied Cognition: Six Lessons from Babies Artificial Life. Vol. 11, Issues 1-2, pp. 13 - 30	tba	Paul R. Cohen, Tim Oates, Marc S. Atkin, and Carole R. Beal. 1996. Building a Baby. In Proceedings of the Eighteenth Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society, L. Erlbaum, pp. 518-522. Takác(, M.: Construction of Meanings in Biological and Artificial Agents. In: Trajkovski, G., Collins, S. G. (eds.): Agent-Based Societies: Social and Cultural Interactions, IGI Global, Hershey, PA, in press.
12.	Dec 15	Closing & Exam	Examination syllabus

Assessment details

Evaluation

Seminar Activities

Before each seminar, a student should carefully read all articles from the related group of seminar readings (supplementary resources are optional) and make up at least three questions or discussion points related to the articles. The discussion points should be sent to the mailing list C S C T R 2 0 1 0 (at) l i s t s . d a i . f m p h . u n i b a . s k not later than on the day before the seminar by 8:00 p.m.. For each seminar, a moderator will be appointed in advance. The duty of the moderator is to collect and sort received discussion points and then moderate the discussion. The students will be evaluated for their prepared questions, discussion activity and ability to moderate the discussions.

Oral Exam

There will be short oral individual exams at the end of the semester. Please note the (preliminary) examination syllabus.

Last modification: Dec 9, 2010