Processing Natural Language About Ongoing Actions
This work addresses the problem of real-time natural language understanding for autonomous systems, though it appears incremental as it builds on an existing implementation.
The paper tackled the challenge of processing natural language requests about ongoing actions, such as interruptions or resumptions, by extending the Language Communication with Autonomous Systems (LCAS) framework with X-nets, enabling asynchronous handling of these requests in a simulated robot domain.
Actions may not proceed as planned; they may be interrupted, resumed or overridden. This is a challenge to handle in a natural language understanding system. We describe extensions to an existing implementation for the control of autonomous systems by natural language, to enable such systems to handle incoming language requests regarding actions. Language Communication with Autonomous Systems (LCAS) has been extended with support for X-nets, parameterized executable schemas representing actions. X-nets enable the system to control actions at a desired level of granularity, while providing a mechanism for language requests to be processed asynchronously. Standard semantics supported include requests to stop, continue, or override the existing action. The specific domain demonstrated is the control of motion of a simulated robot, but the approach is general, and could be applied to other domains.