A Spoken Dialogue System for Spatial Question Answering in a Physical Blocks World

Georgiy Platonov, Lenhart Schubert, Benjamin Kane, Aaron Gindi


Abstract
A physical blocks world, despite its relative simplicity, requires (in fully interactive form) a rich set of functional capabilities, ranging from vision to natural language understanding. In this work we tackle spatial question answering in a holistic way, using a vision system, speech input and output mediated by an animated avatar, a dialogue system that robustly interprets spatial queries, and a constraint solver that derives answers based on 3-D spatial modeling. The contributions of this work include a semantic parser that maps spatial questions into logical forms consistent with a general approach to meaning representation, a dialogue manager based on a schema representation, and a constraint solver for spatial questions that provides answers in agreement with human perception. These and other components are integrated into a multi-modal human-computer interaction pipeline.
Anthology ID:
2020.sigdial-1.16
Volume:
Proceedings of the 21th Annual Meeting of the Special Interest Group on Discourse and Dialogue
Month:
July
Year:
2020
Address:
1st virtual meeting
Editors:
Olivier Pietquin, Smaranda Muresan, Vivian Chen, Casey Kennington, David Vandyke, Nina Dethlefs, Koji Inoue, Erik Ekstedt, Stefan Ultes
Venue:
SIGDIAL
SIG:
SIGDIAL
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
128–131
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.sigdial-1.16
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2020.sigdial-1.16
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Georgiy Platonov, Lenhart Schubert, Benjamin Kane, and Aaron Gindi. 2020. A Spoken Dialogue System for Spatial Question Answering in a Physical Blocks World. In Proceedings of the 21th Annual Meeting of the Special Interest Group on Discourse and Dialogue, pages 128–131, 1st virtual meeting. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
A Spoken Dialogue System for Spatial Question Answering in a Physical Blocks World (Platonov et al., SIGDIAL 2020)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.sigdial-1.16.pdf
Video:
 https://youtube.com/watch?v=ynx2F5Hme4I
Data
CLEVR