Facebook AI researchers create a text-based adventure to study how AI speak and act

Artificial intelligence can write news dispatches and riff somewhat coherently on prompts, but can it learn to navigate a fantasy text-based game? That's what scientists at Facebook AI Research, the Lorraine Research Laboratory in Computer Science and its Applications, and the University College London set out to discover in a recent study, which they describe in a paper published on the preprint server Arxiv.org The researchers specifically investigated the impact of grounding dialogue -- a collection of mutual knowledge, beliefs, and assumptions essential for communication between two people -- on AI agents' understanding of the virtual world around them. Toward that end, they built a research environment in the form of a large-scale, crowdsourced text adventure -- LIGHT -- within which AI systems and humans interact as player characters. "[T]he current state of the art uses only the statistical regularities of language data, without explicit understanding of the world that the language describes," the paper's authors wrote.