Grounding Language for Interactive Task Learning

Abstract

This paper describes how language is grounded by a comprehension system called Lucia within a robotic agent called Rosie that can manipulate objects and navigate indoors. The whole system is built within the Soar cognitive architecture and uses Embodied Construction Grammar (ECG) as a formalism for describing linguistic knowledge. Grounding is performed using knowledge from the grammar itself, from the linguistic context, from the agent's perception, and from an ontology of long-term knowledge about object categories and properties and actions the agent can perform. The paper also describes a benchmark corpus of 200 sentences in this domain, along with test versions of the world model and ontology, and gold-standard meanings for each of the sentences. The benchmark is contained in the supplemental materials.