Natural Language Interpretation for an Interactive Service Robot in Domestic Domains

In this paper, we propose a flexible system for robust natural language interpretation of spoken commands on a mobile robot in domestic service robotics applications. Existing language processing for instructing a mobile robot is often restricted by using a simple grammar where precisely pre-defined utterances are directly mapped to system calls. These approaches do not regard fallibility of human users and they only allow for binary processing of an utterance; either a command is part of the grammar and hence understood correctly, or it is not part of the grammar and gets rejected. We model the language processing as an interpretation process where the utterance needs to be mapped to the robot’s capabilities. We do so by casting the processing as a (decision-theoretic) planning problem on interpretation actions. This allows for a flexible system that can resolve ambiguities and which is also capable of initiating steps to achieve clarification. We show how we evaluated several versions of the system with multiple utterances of different complexity as well as with incomplete and erroneous requests.

[1]  D. Fox,et al.  Integrated Plan-based Control of Autonomous Service Robots in Human Environments , 2001 .

[2]  Gerhard Lakemeyer,et al.  A Robust Speech Recognition System for Service-Robotics Applications , 2008, RoboCup.

[3]  Alexander Ferrein,et al.  Logic-based robot control in highly dynamic domains , 2008, Robotics Auton. Syst..

[4]  Martin L. Puterman,et al.  Markov Decision Processes: Discrete Stochastic Dynamic Programming , 1994 .

[5]  Terrence Fong,et al.  Collaboration, Dialogue, Human-Robot Interaction , 2001, ISRR.

[6]  John G. Gibbons.  Knowledge in Action , 2001 .

[7]  S. Ervin-Tripp.  Is Sybil there? the structure of some American English directives , 1976, Language in Society.

[8]  Gerhard Lakemeyer,et al.  Flexible Command Interpretation on an Interactive Domestic Service Robot , 2012, ICAART.

[9]  Hector J. Levesque,et al.  GOLOG: A Logic Programming Language for Dynamic Domains , 1997, J. Log. Program..

[10]  Hector J. Levesque,et al.  Speech Acts and Rationality , 1985, ACL.

[11]  Libor Preucil,et al.  European Robotics Symposium 2008 , 2008 .

[12]  Craig Boutilier,et al.  Decision-Theoretic, High-Level Agent Programming in the Situation Calculus , 2000, AAAI/IAAI.

[13]  Mikhail Soutchanski,et al.  Reasoning about Large Taxonomies of Actions , 2008, AAAI.

[14]  Wolfram Burgard,et al.  Integrated, plan-based control of autonomous robot in human environments , 2001, IEEE Intelligent Systems.

[15]  Stuart M. Shieber,et al.  Evidence against the context-freeness of natural language , 1985 .

[16]  Csr Young,et al.  How to Do Things With Words , 2009 .

[17]  R. S. Scowen.  Generic base standards , 1993, Proceedings 1993 Software Engineering Standards Symposium.

[18]  Raymond Reiter,et al.  Knowledge in Action: Logical Foundations for Specifying and Implementing Dynamical Systems , 2001 .

[19]  J. McCarthy.  Situations, Actions, and Causal Laws , 1963 .

[20]  Rachid Alami,et al.  A study of interaction between dialog and decision for human-robot collaborative task achievement , 2007, RO-MAN 2007 - The 16th IEEE International Symposium on Robot and Human Interactive Communication.

[21]  John R. Searle,et al.  Speech Acts: An Essay in the Philosophy of Language , 1970 .

[22]  Bernd Ludwig,et al.  Speech Dialogue Systems — A Pragmatics-Guided Approach to Rational Interaction , 2003 .

[23]  Bernd Ludwig,et al.  Speech Dialogue Systems -- A "Pragmatics-First'' Approach to Rational Interaction , 2002 .

[24]  Luca Iocchi,et al.  RoboCup@Home: Scientific Competition and Benchmarking for Domestic Service Robots , 2009 .