Martin Butz & D. Zöllner: Towards Grounding Compositional Concept Structures in Self-organizing Neural Encodings

While the symbol grounding problem of agreeing on a mapping between symbols and sensory or even sensorimotor grounded concepts has been solved to a large extent, one possibly even deeper open problem remains: How do concepts and compositional concept structures develop in the first place? Concepts may be described as integrative mental representations that encode certain sensory, motor, or sensorimotor states or events. Compositionality, on the other hand, determines how concepts are associated with each other in a semantically meaningful and highly flexible manner. We argue that progressively complex concepts and compositional structures can be developed starting from very basic perceptual and motor control mechanisms. An experiment with a simple simulated robot gives hints about highly relevant structural ontogenetic prerequisites for their development. In the outlook, we conclude by sketching out the current most pressing challenges ahead.

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