Language has evolved rich vocabularies, especially action verbs and their modifiers, that can felicitously describe simple as well as complex movements performed by humans and others. The overall long term goal is to model the structure of human-like agents, instruct them in natural language to perform simple physical tasks, and display e actions being performed in terms of computer graphics animation. The research addresses selected problems, issues and methods of solutions in the overall endeavor. The PI's Ph.D. dissertation(1990, University of Pennsylvania). argued that it is necessary to investigate how natural language relates to concepts of space, motion and force, and use these relations in the specification of lexical semantics of action verbs and their modifiers. In the proposed research, we will further strengthen the claims of obtaining useful lexical entries for an extended set of action verbs and their modifiers. We will investigate salient functional, structural and other properties of manipulated objects and the physical environment in general, required for motion bases on the structure, function and other relevant constrain: this is crucial to actually executing tasks specified by natural language instructions in varying physical situations. Meaning entries (given in natural language) for action verbs in human dictionaries and determine the nature of processing necessary to use such entries for possible acquisition of new computational lexical entries.
