A proposal of architecture for intelligent systems with manipulative grounded symbols

The architecture constructed with two types of processing, symbolic processing and parallel distributed processing, seems promising for intelligent systems. But the "symbol grounding problem", the discrepancy between the system and the symbols given by the top-down approach, arises. To solve this problem, the paper presents a framework in which the system self-organizes grounded symbols and uses them for symbolic processing. A navigation task of an autonomous robot is employed as an example. The state space for the robot is self-organized by the distributions of the input-output relationships through the interactions between the robot and the environment. Using the self-organized symbols, the robot can navigate by switching some neural controllers autonomously. Some simulations show the effectiveness of the proposed method.