Asking for Help Using Inverse Semantics

Citations Over TimeTop 1% of 2014 papers

Abstract

Robots inevitably fail, often without the ability to recover autonomously. We demonstrate an approach for enabling a robot to recover from failures by communicating its need for specific help to a human partner using natural language. Our approach automatically detects failures, then generates targeted spoken-language requests for help such as "Please give me the white table leg that is on the black table." Once the human partner has repaired the failure condition, the system resumes full autonomy. We present a novel inverse semantics algorithm for generating effective help requests. In contrast to forward semantic models that interpret natural language in terms of robot actions and perception, our inverse semantics algorithm generates requests by emulating the human's ability to interpret a request using the Generalized Grounding Graph (G 3 ) framework. To assess the effectiveness of our approach, we present a corpusbased online evaluation, as well as an end-to-end user study, demonstrating that our approach increases the effectiveness of human interventions compared to static requests for help.

Related Papers

• → JastAdd—an aspect-oriented compiler construction system(2002)169 cited
• → Modular language implementation in Rascal – experience report(2015)31 cited
• → Prolog - the language and its implementation compared with Lisp(1977)241 cited
• → On objects and events(2001)10 cited
• → Practical Verification for the Working Programmer with CodeContracts and Abstract Interpretation(2011)9 cited