Natural Language Interaction with Robots

Abstract

Natural language communication with robots has obvious uses in almost all areas of life. Computer-based natural language interaction is an active area of research in Computational Linguistics and AI. While there have been several NL systems built for specific computer applications, NL interaction with robots remains largely unexplored. Our research focuses on implementing a natural language interpreter for commands and queries given to a small mobile robot. Our goal is to implement a complete system for natural language understanding in this domain, and as such consists of two main parts: a system for parsing the subset of English our robot is to understand and a semantic analyzer used to extract meaning from the natural language. By using such a system we will be able to demonstrate that a mobile robot is capable of understanding NL commands and queries and responding to them appropriately.