SIGdial 2018

19th Annual SIGdial Meeting on Discourse and Dialogue

Jointly Improving Parsing and Perception for Natural Language Commands through Human-Robot Dialog

Jesse Thomason, Aishwarya Padmakumar, Jivko Sinapov, Nick Walker, Yuqian Jiang, Harel Yedidsion, Justin Hart, Peter Stone, Raymond J. Mooney

In this work, we present methods for parsing natural language to underlying meanings, and using robotic sensors to create multi-modal models of perceptual concepts. We combine these steps towards language understanding into a holistic agent for jointly improving parsing and perception on a robotic platform through human-robot dialog. We train and evaluate this agent on Amazon Mechanical Turk, then demonstrate it on a robotic platform initialized from that conversational data. Our experiments show that improving both parsing and perception components from conversations improves communication quality and human ratings of the agent.