Spatial Information in Instructions and Questions to an Autonomous System

Abstract

The task of supplying user-friendly access to an autonomous system using natural language is an interesting field of research which can be partitioned into access to autonomous robots and simulated agents. The perceptual information of such a system is to be related to language expressions in order to be able to talk about spatial configurations. The multiplicity of possible utterances is one of the main difficulties with natural language in general. In this paper, we concentrate on spatial expressions in different kinds of instructions and questions using anytime algorithms in order to consider resource limitations. 1 Introduction Autonomous systems are characterized by their sometimes unpredictable behavior. E.g., their error recovery feature can cause understanding problems for the user: he possibly does not know why the system acts in a certain way. Thus, intelligent systems should also have intelligent man-machine interfaces in order to improve cooperativeness [14]. Talking about..