Shared task proposal: Instruction giving in virtual worlds

This paper reports on the results of the working group “Virtual Environ-ments ” at the Workshop on Shared Tasks and Comparative Evaluation for NLG. This working group discussed the use of virtual environments as a platform for NLG evaluation, and more specifically of the generation of in

Generating Instructions in Virtual Environments (GIVE): A Challenge and an Evaluation Testbed for NLG

Would it be helpful or detrimental for the field of NLG to have a generally accepted competition? Competitions have definitely advanced the state of the art in some fields of NLP, but the benefits sometimes come at the price of over-competitiveness, and there is a danger of overfitting systems to the concrete evaluation metrics. Moreover, it has been argued that there are intrinsic difficulties in NLG that make it harder to evaluate than other NLP tasks (Scott and Moore, 2006)

Desktop publishing: An On-line distance learning course

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A dialogue based mobile virtual assistant for tourists: The SpaceBook Project

Ubiquitous mobile computing offers innovative approaches in the delivery of information that can facilitate free roaming of the city, informing and guiding the tourist as the city unfolds before them. However making frequent visual reference to mobile devices can be distracting, the user having to interact via a small screen thus disrupting the explorative experience. This research reports on an EU funded project, SpaceBook, that explored the utility of a hands-free, eyes-free virtual tour guide, that could answer questions through a spoken dialogue user interface and notify the user of interesting features in view while guiding the tourist to various destinations. Visibility modelling was carried out in real-time based on a LiDAR sourced digital surface model, fused with a variety of map and crowd sourced datasets (e.g. Ordnance Survey, OpenStreetMap, Flickr, Foursquare) to establish the most interesting landmarks visible from the user's location at any given moment. A number of variations of the SpaceBook system were trialled in Edinburgh (Scotland). The research highlighted the pleasure derived from this novel form of interaction and revealed the complexity of prioritising route guidance instruction alongside identification, description and embellishment of landmark information – there being a delicate balance between the level of information ‘pushed’ to the user, and the user's requests for further information. Among a number of challenges, were issues regarding the fidelity of spatial data and positioning information required for pedestrian based systems – the pedestrian having much greater freedom of movement than vehicles

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 robot’s environment using only the robot’s video feed and corresponding odometry. This method produces a map of the robot’s 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

Intuitive Instruction of Industrial Robots : A Knowledge-Based Approach

With more advanced manufacturing technologies, small and medium sized enterprises can compete with low-wage labor by providing customized and high quality products. For small production series, robotic systems can provide a cost-effective solution. However, for robots to be able to perform on par with human workers in manufacturing industries, they must become flexible and autonomous in their task execution and swift and easy to instruct. This will enable small businesses with short production series or highly customized products to use robot coworkers without consulting expert robot programmers. The objective of this thesis is to explore programming solutions that can reduce the programming effort of sensor-controlled robot tasks. The robot motions are expressed using constraints, and multiple of simple constrained motions can be combined into a robot skill. The skill can be stored in a knowledge base together with a semantic description, which enables reuse and reasoning. The main contributions of the thesis are 1) development of ontologies for knowledge about robot devices and skills, 2) a user interface that provides simple programming of dual-arm skills for non-experts and experts, 3) a programming interface for task descriptions in unstructured natural language in a user-specified vocabulary and 4) an implementation where low-level code is generated from the high-level descriptions. The resulting system greatly reduces the number of parameters exposed to the user, is simple to use for non-experts and reduces the programming time for experts by 80%. The representation is described on a semantic level, which means that the same skill can be used on different robot platforms. The research is presented in seven papers, the first describing the knowledge representation and the second the knowledge-based architecture that enables skill sharing between robots. The third paper presents the translation from high-level instructions to low-level code for force-controlled motions. The two following papers evaluate the simplified programming prototype for non-expert and expert users. The last two present how program statements are extracted from unstructured natural language descriptions

Motivational techniques that aid drivers to choose unselfish routes

指導教員：角　

Mapping reading strategies in an electronic efl learning environment

Tese (doutorado) - Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina, Centro de Comunicação e Expressão. Curso de Pós-Graduação em Letras/Inglês e Literatura CorrespondenteEsta pesquisa teve como objetivo principal fazer o mapeamento das estratégias de leitura utilizadas por alunos brasileiros de inglês em um ambiente eletrônico instrucional. Duas outras questões também fizeram parte da pesquisa, uma questionando se houve aumento de motivação com o uso do formato hipertextual. A perspectiva dos participantes da pesquisa foi o ponto de partida para tal análise. O outro questionamento girava em torno do aumento ou não da demanda cognitiva sobre os sujeitos devido ao uso da plataforma hipertextual. Doze sujeitos participaram do experimento o qual utilizou um aplicativo versando sobre estratégias básicas de leitura especialmente desenvolvido para esta pesquisa. Os resultados e a análise dos dados foram baseados na adaptação feita por Kauer e colaboradores (1999) do modelo de interação de sete estágios de Norman (1988). Um protocolo verbal, um questionário e as observações da pesquisadora foram os instrumentos utilizados para análise dos dados obtidos. Setenta e um estágios/estratégias foram identificados dentro de um contexto altamente decisório. A análise dos dados sugeriu que de acordo com a percepção dos participantes houve um aumento da motivação. A presente pesquisa buscou suporte para tal percepção em fatores tais como estilo de aprendizagem, objetivos estabelecidos, nível de competência de conteúdo e da interface, dentre outros. Também não foi constatada sobrecarga cognitiva sobre os participantes devido ao uso do formato hipertextual. Como consequência, nenhum efeito colateral significativo, como desorientação ou frustração, ficou evidenciado