Human Natural Instruction of a Simulated Electronic Student

Abstract

Humans naturally use multiple modes of instruction while teaching one another. We would like our robots and artificial agents to be instructed in the same way, rather than programmed. In this paper, we review prior work on human instruction of autonomous agents and present observations from two exploratory pilot studies and the results of a full study investigating how multiple instruction modes are used by humans. We describe our Bootstrapped Learning User Interface, a prototype multi-instruction interface informed by our human-user studies.