---
title: "A Discriminative Approach to Grounded Spoken Language Understanding in Interactive Robotics"
authors:
  - "Emanuele Bastianelli"
  - "Danilo Croce"
  - "Andrea Vanzo"
  - "Roberto Basili"
  - "Daniele Nardi"
doi: ""
url: "https://ijcai.org/proceedings/2016/390"
pdf: "https://ijcai.org/proceedings/2016/0390.pdf"
venue: "Proceedings of the Twenty-Fifth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence"
year: 2016
pages: "2747-2752"
track: ""
keywords:
---

# A Discriminative Approach to Grounded Spoken Language Understanding in Interactive Robotics

Emanuele Bastianelli, Danilo Croce, Andrea Vanzo, Roberto Basili, Daniele Nardi

*Proceedings of the Twenty-Fifth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence*, pages 2747-2752.

## Abstract

Spoken Language Understanding in Interactive Robotics provides computational models of human-machine communication based on the vocal input. However, robots operate in specific environments and the correct interpretation of the spoken sentences depends on the physical, cognitive and linguistic aspects triggered by the operational environment. Grounded language pro- cessing should exploit both the physical constraints of the context as well as knowledge assumptions of the robot. These include the subjective perception of the environment that explicitly affects linguistic reasoning. In this work, a standard linguistic pipeline for semantic parsing is extended toward a form of perceptually informed natural language processing that combines discriminative learning and distributional semantics. Empirical results achieve up to a 40% of relative error reduction.