NIPS 2011 Learning Semantics Workshop: Learning Semantics of Movement

Learning Semantics Workshop at NIPS 2011 Invited Talk: Learning Semantics of Movement by Timo Honkela Abstract: In this presentation, we consider how to computationally model the interrelated processes of understanding natural language and perceiving and producing movement in multimodal real world contexts. Movement is the specific focus of this presentation for several reasons. For instance, it is a fundamental part of human activities that ground our understanding of the world. We are developing methods and technologies to automatically associate human movements detected by motion capture and in video sequences with their linguistic descriptions. When the association between human movement and their linguistic descriptions has been learned using pattern recognition and statistical machine learning methods, the system is also used to produce animations based on written instructions and for labeling motion capture and video sequences. We consider three different aspects: using video and motion tracking data, applying multi-task learning methods, and framing the problem within cognitive linguistics research.