Symbol Emergence in Cognitive Developmental Systems: a Survey

Symbol emergence through a robot’s own interactive exploration of the world without human intervention has been investigated now for several decades. However, methods that enable a machine to form symbol systems in a robust bottom-up manner are still missing. Clearly this shows that we still do not have an appropriate computational understanding that explains symbol emergence in biological and artificial systems. Over the years it became more and more clear that symbol emergence has to be posed as a multi-facetted problem. Therefore, we will first review the history of the symbol emergence problem in different fields showing their mutual relations. Then we will describe recent work and approaches to solve this problem with the aim of providing an integrative and comprehensive overview of symbol emergence for future research.