Robust natural language dialogues for instruction tasks

Abstract

Being able to understand and carry out spoken natural instructions even in limited domains is extremely challenging for current robots. The difficulties are multifarious, ranging from problems with speech recognizers to difficulties with parsing disfluent speech or resolving references based on perceptual or task-based knowledge. In this paper, we present our efforts at starting to address these problems with an integrated natural language understanding system implemented in our DIARC architecture on a robot that can handle fairly unconstrained spoken ungrammatical and incomplete instructions reliably in a limited domain.