Grounded Situation Models for Situated Conversational Assistants

A Situated Conversational Assistant (SCA) is a system with sensing, acting and speech synthesis/recognition abilities, which engages in physically situated natural language conversation with human partners and assists them in carrying out tasks. This thesis addresses some prerequisites towards an ideal truly cooperative SCA through the development of a computational model of embodied, situated language agents and implementation of the model in the form of an interactive, conversational robot. The proposed model produces systems that are capable of a core set of situated natural language communication skills, and provides leverage for many extensions towards the ideal SCA, such as mind reading skills. The central idea is to endow agents with a sensor-updated "structured blackboard" representational structure called a Grounded Situation Model (GSM), which is closely related to the cognitive psychology notion of situation models. The GSM serves as a workspace with contents similar to a "theatrical stage" in the agent's "mind". The GSM may be filled either with the contents of the agent's present here-and-now physical situation, or a past situation that is being recalled, or an imaginary situation that is being described or planned.

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

2007

Author dc:creator

• Mavridis, Nikolaos

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Rosalind W. Picard.

• 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/1721.1/38523

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/38523