Acquisition of Grammar in Autonomous Artificial Systems

Over the past several decades, psycholinguists have gained countless insights into the process of child language acquisition. Can these findings be used for the development of language competence in autonomous artificial systems? This paper reports on our attempt to apply insights from developmental psychology in order to enable artificial systems to acquire language. We consider a comprehensive chain of computational processes, starting from conceptualization and extending through language generation and interpretation, and show how they can be intertwined to allow for acquisition of complex aspects of grammar.