Towards a Sensorimotor WordNetSM: Closing the Semantic Gap

We have empirically discovered that the space of human actions has a grammatical structure. This is a motoric space consisting of the evolution of the joint angles of the human body in movement. Furthermore, the process of assembling individual human movements into higher level descriptions resembles in a natural sense the process of speech recognition. Thus the space of human activity has its own phonemes, morphemes, words (verbs, nouns, adjectives, adverbs), and sentences formed by its own syntax. This has a number of implications for the grounding problem and cognition in general. With regard to WordNet, the theory points to a future Sensorimotor WordNet which contains a map between the nodes of the current WordNet and the space consisting of human action. In this paper, we suggest initial steps towards closing the semantic gap by grounding language with visuomotor information. The grounding takes place on a set of primitive words which are selected here through verb classification of the WordNet lexicon. A formal approach to the identification of primitive words would consider the basic atoms of WordNet extensions. However, one further extension is required to incorporate grounded information into WordNet in the direction of a sensorimotor WordNet, designated here as WordNetSM.