@inproceedings{torres-foncesca-etal-2022-symbol,
    title = "Symbol and Communicative Grounding through Object Permanence with a Mobile Robot",
    author = "Torres-Fonseca, Josue  and
      Henry, Catherine  and
      Kennington, Casey",
    editor = "Lemon, Oliver  and
      Hakkani-Tur, Dilek  and
      Li, Junyi Jessy  and
      Ashrafzadeh, Arash  and
      Garcia, Daniel Hern{\'a}ndez  and
      Alikhani, Malihe  and
      Vandyke, David  and
      Du{\v{s}}ek, Ond{\v{r}}ej",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 23rd Annual Meeting of the Special Interest Group on Discourse and Dialogue",
    month = sep,
    year = "2022",
    address = "Edinburgh, UK",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/jlcl-multiple-ingestion/2022.sigdial-1.14/",
    doi = "10.18653/v1/2022.sigdial-1.14",
    pages = "124--134",
    abstract = "Object permanence is the ability to form and recall mental representations of objects even when they are not in view. Despite being a crucial developmental step for children, object permanence has had only some exploration as it relates to symbol and communicative grounding in spoken dialogue systems. In this paper, we leverage SLAM as a module for tracking object permanence and use a robot platform to move around a scene where it discovers objects and learns how they are denoted. We evaluated by comparing our system`s effectiveness at learning words from human dialogue partners both with and without object permanence. We found that with object permanence, human dialogue partners spoke with the robot and the robot correctly identified objects it had learned about significantly more than without object permanence, which suggests that object permanence helped facilitate communicative and symbol grounding."
}