Learning Interpretable Spatial Operations in a Rich 3D Blocks World

In this paper, we study the problem of mapping natural language instructions to complex spatial actions in a 3D blocks world. We first introduce a new dataset that pairs complex 3D spatial operations to rich natural language descriptions that require complex spatial and pragmatic interpretations such as "mirroring", "twisting", and "balancing". This dataset, built on the simulation environment of Bisk, Yuret, and Marcu (2016), attains language that is significantly richer and more complex, while also doubling the size of the original dataset in the 2D environment with 100 new world configurations and 250,000 tokens. In addition, we propose a new neural architecture that achieves competitive results while automatically discovering an inventory of interpretable spatial operations (Figure 5)Comment: AAAI 201

Learning a Policy for Opportunistic Active Learning

Active learning identifies data points to label that are expected to be the most useful in improving a supervised model. Opportunistic active learning incorporates active learning into interactive tasks that constrain possible queries during interactions. Prior work has shown that opportunistic active learning can be used to improve grounding of natural language descriptions in an interactive object retrieval task. In this work, we use reinforcement learning for such an object retrieval task, to learn a policy that effectively trades off task completion with model improvement that would benefit future tasks.Comment: EMNLP 2018 Camera Read

Improving Grounded Natural Language Understanding through Human-Robot Dialog

Natural language understanding for robotics can require substantial domain- and platform-specific engineering. For example, for mobile robots to pick-and-place objects in an environment to satisfy human commands, we can specify the language humans use to issue such commands, and connect concept words like red can to physical object properties. One way to alleviate this engineering for a new domain is to enable robots in human environments to adapt dynamically---continually learning new language constructions and perceptual concepts. In this work, we present an end-to-end pipeline for translating natural language commands to discrete robot actions, and use clarification dialogs to jointly improve language parsing and concept grounding. We train and evaluate this agent in a virtual setting on Amazon Mechanical Turk, and we transfer the learned agent to a physical robot platform to demonstrate it in the real world