Towards Action Representation within the Framework of Conceptual Spaces: Preliminary Results

We propose an approach for the representation of actions based on the conceptual spaces framework developed by Gärdenfors (2004). Action categories are regarded as properties in the sense of Gärdenfors (2011) and are understood as convex regions in action space. Action categories are mainly described by a force signature that represents the forces that act upon a main trajector involved in the action. This force signature is approximated via a representation that specifies the time-indexed position of the trajector relative to several landmarks. We also present a computational approach to extract such representations from video data. We present results on the Motionese dataset consisting of videos of parents demonstrating actions on objects to their children. We evaluate the representations on a clustering and a classification task showing that, while our representations seems to be reasonable, only a handful of actions can be discriminated reliably.