Human Language Technology Research Institute
HLTRI
The University of Texas at Dallas
HLTRI Seminars Prof. Raymond J. Mooney

Prof. Raymond J. Mooney
    The University of Texas at Austin
    Computer Science
    http://www.cs.utexas.edu/~mooney


Learning Language from its Perceptual Context

Seminar on Mar 06, 2008, 2:00 p.m.
Engineering and Computer Science South 2.415

Current systems that learn to process natural language require laboriously constructed human-annotated training data. Ideally, a computer would be able to acquire language like a child by being exposed to linguistic input in the context of a relevant but ambiguous perceptual environment. As a step in this direction, we present a system that learns language from sportscasts of simulated soccer games. The training data consists of textual human commentaries on Robocup simulation games. A set of possible meanings for each comment is automatically constructed from game event traces. Our previously developed systems for learning to parse and generate natural language (KRISP and WASP) were augmented to learn from this data and then commentate novel games. The system is evaluated based on its ability to parse sentences into correct meanings and generate accurate descriptions of game events. Human evaluation was also conducted on the overall quality of the generated sportscasts and compared to human-generated commentaries.


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