Improving Natural Language Interaction with Robots Using Advice

Nikhil Mehta, Dan Goldwasser


Abstract
Over the last few years, there has been growing interest in learning models for physically grounded language understanding tasks, such as the popular blocks world domain. These works typically view this problem as a single-step process, in which a human operator gives an instruction and an automated agent is evaluated on its ability to execute it. In this paper we take the first step towards increasing the bandwidth of this interaction, and suggest a protocol for including advice, high-level observations about the task, which can help constrain the agent’s prediction. We evaluate our approach on the blocks world task, and show that even simple advice can help lead to significant performance improvements. To help reduce the effort involved in supplying the advice, we also explore model self-generated advice which can still improve results.
Anthology ID:
N19-1195
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2019 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, Volume 1 (Long and Short Papers)
Month:
June
Year:
2019
Address:
Minneapolis, Minnesota
Editors:
Jill Burstein, Christy Doran, Thamar Solorio
Venue:
NAACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
1962–1967
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/N19-1195
DOI:
10.18653/v1/N19-1195
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Nikhil Mehta and Dan Goldwasser. 2019. Improving Natural Language Interaction with Robots Using Advice. In Proceedings of the 2019 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, Volume 1 (Long and Short Papers), pages 1962–1967, Minneapolis, Minnesota. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Improving Natural Language Interaction with Robots Using Advice (Mehta & Goldwasser, NAACL 2019)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/N19-1195.pdf
Supplementary:
 N19-1195.Supplementary.pdf
Code
 hockeybro12/Improving-NaturalLanguageInteractionWithRobots-Advice