Do as I say: Translating language into movement: Computer model aims to turn film scripts into animations

Scientists have made tremendous leaps in getting computers to understand natural language, as well as in generating a series of physical poses to create realistic animations. These capabilities might as well exist in separate worlds, however, because the link between natural language and physical poses has been missing. Louis-Philippe Morency, associate professor in the Language Technologies Institute (LTI), and Chaitanya Ahuja, an LTI Ph.D. student, are working to bring those worlds together using a neural architecture they call Joint Language-to-Pose, or JL2P. The JL2P model enables sentences and physical motions to be jointly embedded, so it can learn how language is related to action, gestures and movement. "I think we're in an early stage of this research, but from a modeling, artificial intelligence and theory perspective, it's a very exciting moment," Morency said.