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About

Tatiana Alexenko’s research sits at the intersection of human-robot interaction, computational linguistics, and assistive technology for aging populations. Her work focuses on enabling robots to understand natural spatial language—the way people naturally describe locations and directions—to perform fetch tasks in indoor environments. A key contribution is her development of a human-driven spatial language system that processes referencing language and extracts tree structures of language chunks, grounding them to robot actions. Her most cited paper (15 citations) presents a corpus of spatial descriptions from older adults and a system for robot comprehension in eldercare settings. She also pioneered an Android-based speech processing interface for controlling assistive robots, demonstrating practical, low-cost solutions for home environments. Through human-subject experiments comparing younger and older adults’ spatial descriptions, Alexenko assessed how effectively seniors communicate with robots versus humans, directly informing the design of more accessible assistive technologies. Her work has accumulated over 40 citations, establishing her as a contributor to making robots more responsive to the natural language of elderly users.