49 research outputs found
Learning perceptually grounded word meanings from unaligned parallel data
In order for robots to effectively understand natural language commands, they must be able to acquire meaning representations that can be mapped to perceptual features in the external world. Previous approaches to learning these grounded meaning representations require detailed annotations at training time. In this paper, we present an approach to grounded language acquisition which is capable of jointly learning a policy for following natural language commands such as âPick up the tire pallet,â as well as a mapping between specific phrases in the language and aspects of the external world; for example the mapping between the words âthe tire palletâ and a specific object in the environment. Our approach assumes a parametric form for the policy that the robot uses to choose actions in response to a natural language command that factors based on the structure of the language. We use a gradient method to optimize model parameters. Our evaluation demonstrates the effectiveness of the model on a corpus of commands given to a robotic forklift by untrained users.U.S. Army Research Laboratory (Collaborative Technology Alliance Program, Cooperative Agreement W911NF-10-2-0016)United States. Office of Naval Research (MURIs N00014-07-1-0749)United States. Army Research Office (MURI N00014-11-1-0688)United States. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA BOLT program under contract HR0011-11-2-0008
Training an adaptive dialogue policy for interactive learning of visually grounded word meanings
We present a multi-modal dialogue system for interactive learning of
perceptually grounded word meanings from a human tutor. The system integrates
an incremental, semantic parsing/generation framework - Dynamic Syntax and Type
Theory with Records (DS-TTR) - with a set of visual classifiers that are
learned throughout the interaction and which ground the meaning representations
that it produces. We use this system in interaction with a simulated human
tutor to study the effects of different dialogue policies and capabilities on
the accuracy of learned meanings, learning rates, and efforts/costs to the
tutor. We show that the overall performance of the learning agent is affected
by (1) who takes initiative in the dialogues; (2) the ability to express/use
their confidence level about visual attributes; and (3) the ability to process
elliptical and incrementally constructed dialogue turns. Ultimately, we train
an adaptive dialogue policy which optimises the trade-off between classifier
accuracy and tutoring costs.Comment: 11 pages, SIGDIAL 2016 Conferenc
Grounding Language by Continuous Observation of Instruction Following
Han T, Schlangen D. Grounding Language by Continuous Observation of Instruction Following. In: Short Papers -- Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (EACL). Proceedings of the 15th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics. Vol 2. Valencia: Association for Computational Linguistics; 2017: 491-496
A Review of Verbal and Non-Verbal Human-Robot Interactive Communication
In this paper, an overview of human-robot interactive communication is
presented, covering verbal as well as non-verbal aspects of human-robot
interaction. Following a historical introduction, and motivation towards fluid
human-robot communication, ten desiderata are proposed, which provide an
organizational axis both of recent as well as of future research on human-robot
communication. Then, the ten desiderata are examined in detail, culminating to
a unifying discussion, and a forward-looking conclusion
Learning the Semantics of Manipulation Action
In this paper we present a formal computational framework for modeling
manipulation actions. The introduced formalism leads to semantics of
manipulation action and has applications to both observing and understanding
human manipulation actions as well as executing them with a robotic mechanism
(e.g. a humanoid robot). It is based on a Combinatory Categorial Grammar. The
goal of the introduced framework is to: (1) represent manipulation actions with
both syntax and semantic parts, where the semantic part employs
-calculus; (2) enable a probabilistic semantic parsing schema to learn
the -calculus representation of manipulation action from an annotated
action corpus of videos; (3) use (1) and (2) to develop a system that visually
observes manipulation actions and understands their meaning while it can reason
beyond observations using propositional logic and axiom schemata. The
experiments conducted on a public available large manipulation action dataset
validate the theoretical framework and our implementation
Grounding robot motion in natural language and visual perception
The current state of the art in military and first responder ground robots involves heavy physical and cognitive burdens on the human operator while taking little to no advantage of the potential autonomy of robotic technology. The robots currently in use are rugged remote-controlled vehicles. Their interaction modalities, usually utilizing a game controller connected to a computer, require a dedicated operator who has limited capacity for other tasks.
I present research which aims to ease these burdens by incorporating multiple modes of robotic sensing into a system which allows humans to interact with robots through a natural-language interface. I conduct this research on a custom-built six-wheeled mobile robot.
First I present a unified framework which supports grounding natural-language semantics in robotic driving. This framework supports learning the meanings of nouns and prepositions from sentential descriptions of paths driven by the robot, as well as using such meanings to both generate a sentential description of a path and perform automated driving of a path specified in natural language. One limitation of this framework is that it requires as input the locations of the (initially nameless) objects in the floor plan.
Next I present a method to automatically detect, localize, and label objects in the robotâs environment using only the robotâs video feed and corresponding odometry. This method produces a map of the robotâs environment in which objects are differentiated by abstract class labels.
Finally, I present work that unifies the previous two approaches. This method detects, localizes, and labels objects, as the previous method does. However, this new method integrates natural-language descriptions to learn actual object names, rather than abstract labels