Learning to Interpret Natural Language Commands through Human-Robot Dialog

Thomason, Jesse; Zhang, Shiqi; Mooney, Raymond J.; Stone, Peter

Learning to Interpret Natural Language Commands through Human-Robot Dialog

Jesse Thomason, Shiqi Zhang, Raymond J. Mooney, Peter Stone

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Proceedings of the Twenty-Fourth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence. Main Track. Pages 1923-1928.

Abstract

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.

Jesse Thomason, Shiqi Zhang, Raymond J. Mooney, and Peter Stone. 2015. Learning to Interpret Natural Language Commands through Human-Robot Dialog. In Proceedings of the Twenty-Fourth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, IJCAI-15. IJCAI, 1923–1928. https://ijcai.org/proceedings/2015/273

@inproceedings{ijcai2015p273,
  title     = {Learning to Interpret Natural Language Commands through Human-Robot Dialog},
  author    = {Thomason, Jesse and Zhang, Shiqi and Mooney, Raymond J. and Stone, Peter},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the Twenty-Fourth International Joint Conference on
               Artificial Intelligence, {IJCAI-15}},
  publisher = {International Joint Conferences on Artificial Intelligence},
  editor    = {Qiang Yang and Michael Wooldridge},
  pages     = {1923--1928},
  year      = {2015},
  month     = {7},
  note      = {Main Track},
  url       = {https://ijcai.org/proceedings/2015/273},
}

TY  - CPAPER
TI  - Learning to Interpret Natural Language Commands through Human-Robot Dialog
AU  - Thomason, Jesse
AU  - Zhang, Shiqi
AU  - Mooney, Raymond J.
AU  - Stone, Peter
T2  - Proceedings of the Twenty-Fourth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, IJCAI-15
PB  - International Joint Conferences on Artificial Intelligence
PY  - 2015
SP  - 1923
EP  - 1928
UR  - https://ijcai.org/proceedings/2015/273
ER  -