Exploiting a sensed environment to improve human-agent communication

Abstract

This paper describes an implemented robotic agent architecture in which the environment, as sensed by the agent, is used to guide the recognition of spoken and gestural directives given by a human user. The agent recognizes these directives using a probabilistic language model that conditions probability estimates for possible directives on visually-, proprioceptively-, or otherwise-sensed properties of entities in its environment, and updates these probabilities when these properties change. The result is an agent that can discriminate against mis-recognized directives that do not 'make sense' in its representation of the current state of the world.