The practical task of building a talking robot requires a theory of how natural language communication works. Conversely, the best way to computationally verify a theory of natural language communication is to demonstrate its functioning concretely in the form of a talking robot, the epitome of human-machine communication. To build an actual robot requires hardware that provides appropriate recognition and action interfaces, and because such hardware is hard to develop the approach in this book is theoretical: the author presents an artificial cognitive agent with language as a software...

Modern science is divided into three parts: natural sciences, engineering sciences and humanities. Over the last millennia, natural and engineering sciences evolved a symbiotic relationship, but humanities still stand apart. Today, however, designing and building a talking robot is a comparatively new challenge for which all three branches are needed. Starting from the idea that designing a theory of computational cognition should be as complete as possible, and trying to answer questions such as “Which ontology is required for building a computational cognition?”, the current...

Modern science is divided into three parts: natural sciences, engineering sciences and humanities. Over the last millennia, natural and engineering sciences evolved a symbiotic relationship, but humanities still stand apart. Today, however, designing and building a talking robot is a comparatively new challenge for which all three branches are needed. Starting from the idea that designing a theory of computational cognition should be as complete as possible, and trying to answer questions such as “Which ontology is required for building a computational cognition?”, the current...