Robots that say 'no'

This paper reports on foundational considerations for experiments into the acquisition of human-like use and understanding of negation in linguistic utterances via a developmental robotics approach. For this purpose different taxonomies of negation in early child language are analysed in order to show the large variety of communicative functions that these different types of negation have. Requirements for robotic systems that aim at acquiring these utterances in a linguistically unconstrained human-robot dialog are derived from this analysis.