Adaptive acquisition of spoken language

The problem of building a device that acquires language during the course of performing its task, called learning by doing, is considered. Some basic principles and mechanisms upon which such a device might be constructed are described. In particular, a language acquisition mechanism that is based upon the intuition of building associations between messages and appropriate responses to them and a mechanism for human-machine interaction based on control theory methods are investigated. A conversational-mode system that demonstrates and evaluates the proposed principles and mechanisms is described. Experimental results that validate the approach are reported