Grounding language in spatial routines

This thesis describes a spatial language understanding system based on a lexicon of words defined in terms of spatial routines. A spatial routine is a script composed from a set of primitive operations on sensor data, analogous to Ullman's visual routines. By finding a set of primitives that underlie natural spatial language, the meaning of spatial terms can be succinctly expressed in a way that can be used to obey natural language commands. This hypothesis is tested by using spatial routines to build a natural language interface to a real time strategy game, in which a player controls an army of units in a battle. The system understands the meaning of context-dependent natural language commands such as "Run back!" and "Move the marines on top above the fiamethrowers on the bottom." In evaluation, the system successfully interpreted a range of spatial commands not seen during implementation, and exceeded the performance of a baseline system. Beyond real-time strategy games, spatial routines may provide the basis for interpreting spatial language in a broad range of physically situated language understanding systems, such as mobile robots or other computer game genres.

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dept. of Architecture. Program In Media Arts and Sciences

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2006

Author dc:creator

• Tellex, Stefanie, 1980-

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Deb Roy.

• Architecture. Program In Media Arts and Sciences

Statement dc:rights

• M.I.T. theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed from this source for any purpose, but reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission. See provided URL for inquiries about permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/37399

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/37399