Building an adaptive spoken language interface for perceptually grounded human-robot interaction

In previous research, we developed an integrated platform that combined visual scene interpretation with speech processing to provide input to a language-learning model. The system was demonstrated to learn a rich set of sentence-meaning mappings that could allow it to construct the appropriate meanings for new sentences in a generalization task. While this demonstrated potential promise, it fell short in several aspects of providing a useful human-robot interaction system. The current research addresses three of these shortcomings, demonstrating the natural extensibility of the platform architecture. First, the system must be able not only to understand what it hears, but also to describe what it sees and to interact with the human user. This is a natural extension of the knowledge of sentence-to-meaning mappings that is now applied in the inverse scene-to-sentence sense. Secondly, we extend the system´s ontology from physical events to include spatial relations. We show that spatial relations are naturally accommodated in the predicate argument representations for events. Finally, because the robot community is international the robot should be able to speak multiple languages, we thus demonstrate that the language model extends naturally to include both English and Japanese. Concrete results from a working interactive system are presented and future directions for adaptive human-robot interaction systems are outlined.