Simulation of human awareness control in spatiotemporal language understanding as mental image processing

Abstract

Natural language can be the most convenient means for ordinary people at their intuitive interaction with home robots and among all its sublanguages, the spatiotemporal (or 4D) language is expected to be the most important when both the entities communicate each other in their casual scenes. As easily imagined, it is quite ordinary for people to understand a 4D expression with the mental image of a certain scene being described by it and therefore such a human mental process is worth simulating by computers in order to facilitate intuitive human-robot interaction. This paper attempts to model this human performance, considering what people attend to and how they control their awareness during spatiotemporal language understanding as mental image processing.