thomason
Thomason
Intelligent robots frequently need to understand requests from naive users through natural language. Previous approaches either cannot account for language variation, e.g., keyword search, or require gathering large annotated corpora, which can be expensive and cannot adapt to new variation. We introduce a dialog agent for mobile robots that understands human instructions through semantic parsing, actively resolves ambiguities using a dialog manager, and incrementally learns from human-robot conversations by inducing training data from user paraphrases. Our dialog agent is implemented and tested both on a web interface with hundreds of users via Mechanical Turk and on a mobile robot over several days, tasked with understanding navigation and delivery requests through natural language in an office environment. In both contexts, We observe significant improvements in user satisfaction after learning from conversations.
Jointly Improving Parsing and Perception for Natural Language Commands through Human-Robot Dialog
Thomason, Jesse (University of Washington) | Padmakumar, Aishwarya | Sinapov, Jivko | Walker, Nick | Jiang, Yuqian | Yedidsion, Harel | Hart, Justin | Stone, Peter | Mooney, Raymond
In this work, we present methods for using human-robot dialog to improve language understanding for a mobile robot agent. The agent parses natural language to underlying semantic meanings and uses robotic sensors to create multi-modal models of perceptual concepts like red and heavy. The agent can be used for showing navigation routes, delivering objects to people, and relocating objects from one location to another. We use dialog clarification questions both to understand commands and to generate additional parsing training data. The agent employs opportunistic active learning to select questions about how words relate to objects, improving its understanding of perceptual concepts. We evaluated this agent on Amazon Mechanical Turk. After training on data induced from conversations, the agent reduced the number of dialog questions it asked while receiving higher usability ratings. Additionally, we demonstrated the agent on a robotic platform, where it learned new perceptual concepts on the fly while completing a real-world task.
AAAI Workshop on Non-Monotonic Reasoning
Default and auto-epistemic reasoning were also well represented, with a number of papers discussing aspects, applications, and implementations of default reasoning systerns. Several papers emphasized nonmonotonic facets of computational vision, natural language understanding, and conimo1i-sense reasoning. Thursday evening, a panel discussion was held, with John McCarthy, Dana Scott, and Richmond Thomason as panelists. Compare it with a merely COMMON LISP (Golden Common Lisp@ Version 1.OO): Golden Common Lisp is a registered trademark of Gold Hill Computers. Our low-key, dignified approach to matchingquality candidates with quality companies will offer you the opportunity to examine your alternatives in a confidential, systematic fashion Openingsarenationwide.
AAAI Workshop on Nonmonotonic Reasoning
On October 17-19, 1984, a workshop on nonmonotonic hospitality suite-generally until late in the evenings reasoning was held at, Mohonk Mountain House, outside The workshop's only disappointment was the shortness New Paltz, New York. Speakers (and the audience) oft,en found Raymond R.eit,er and Bonnie Webbcr, and was sponsored that much more time could have been well-spent, especially by the American Association for Artificial Intelligence. The hotel is an inmense of much of the work presented. Surrounded by 2000 Preprints of the papers were distributed at the workshop, acres of private preserve, in full autumnal splcndour, participants but no proceedings will be published A limit,ed number quickly forgot the outside world. The grounds of copies of the preprints can be obtained from.