The Language Grounding Problem and its Relation to the Internal Structure of Cognitive Agents

An original approach to modelling internal structure of artificial cognitive agents and the phenomenon of language grounding is presented. The accepted model for the internal cognitive space reflects basic structural properties of human cognition and assumes the partition of cognitive phenomena into conscious and 'non-conscious'. The language is treated as a set of semiotic symbols and is used in semantic communication. Semiotic symbols are related to the internal content of empirical knowledge bases in which they are grounded. This relation is given by the so-called epistemic satisfaction relations defining situations in which semiotic symbols are adequate (grounded) representations of embodied experience. The importance of non-conscious embodied knowledge in language grounding and production is accepted. An example of application of the proposed approach to the analysis of grounding requirements is given for the case of logic equivalences extended with modal operators of possibility, belief and knowledge. Implementation issues are considered.