Title: What can you do with a rock? Affordance extraction via word embeddings,
Abstract: Autonomous agents must often detect affordances: the set of behaviors enabled
by a situation. Affordance detection is particularly helpful in domains with
large action spaces, allowing the agent to prune its search space by avoiding
futile behaviors. This paper presents a method for affordance extraction via
word embeddings trained on a Wikipedia corpus. The resulting word vectors are
treated as a common knowledge database which can be queried using linear
algebra. We apply this method to a reinforcement learning agent in a text-only
environment and show that affordance-based action selection improves
performance most of the time. Our method increases the computational complexity
of each learning step but significantly reduces the total number of steps
needed. In addition, the agent's action selections begin to resemble those a
human would choose.