"From Saying to Doing" - Natural Language Interaction with Artificial Agents and Robots

Abstract

In this paper we presented a framework for action descriptions and its connection to natural language interfaces for artificial agents. The core point of this approach is the use of a generic action/object hierarchy, which allows interpretation of natural language command sentences, issued by a human user, as well as planning and reasoning processes on the conceptual level, and connects to the level of agent executable actions. The linguistic analysis is guided by a case frame representation, which provides a connection to actions (and objects) represented on the conceptual level. Planning processes can be implemented using typical precondition and effect descriptions of actions in the conceptual hierarchy. The level of primitive actions (leaf nodes of this conceptual hierarchy) connects to the agents' executable actions. The level of primitive actions can thus be adapted to different types of physical agents with varying action sets. Further work includes the construction of a suitable, general action ontology, based on standard ontologies like {FrameNet} ({ICSI}, 2007), Ontolingua ({KSL}, 2007), Mikrokosmos ({CRL}, 1996), Cyc (Cycorp, 2007), or {SUMO} (Pease, 2007; {IEEE} {SUO} {WG}, 2003), which will be enriched with precondition and effect formulas. Other topics to be pursued relate to communication of mobile physical agents (humans) in a "speech-controlled" environment. The scenario is related to the "smart house" but instead of being adaptive and intelligent, the house (or environment) is supposed to respond to verbal instructions and questions by the human user. A special issue, we want to address, is the development of a sophisticated context model, and the use of contextual information to resolve ambiguities in the verbal input and to detect impossible or unreasonable actions.