Integrating spatial concepts into a probabilistic concept web

In this paper, we study the learning and representation of grounded spatial concepts in a probabilistic concept web that connects them with other noun, adjective, and verb concepts. Specifically, we focus on the prepositional spatial concepts, such as “on”, “below”, “left”, “right”, “in front of” and “behind”. In our prior work (Celikkanat et al., 2015), inspired from the distributed highly-connected conceptual representation in human brain, we proposed using Markov Random Field for modeling a concept web on a humanoid robot. For adequately expressing the unidirectional (i.e., non-symmetric) nature of the spatial propositions, in this work, we propose a extension of the Markov Random Field into a simple hybrid Markov Random Field model, allowing both undirected and directed connections between concepts. We demonstrate that our humanoid robot, iCub, is able to (i) extract meaningful spatial concepts in addition to noun, adjective and verb concepts from a scene using the proposed model, (ii) correct wrong initial predictions using the connectedness of the concept web, and (iii) respond correctly to queries involving spatial concepts, such as ball-left-of-the-cup.