From Commands to Goal-based Dialogs: A Roadmap to Achieve Natural Language Interaction in RoboCup@Home
This work addresses the need for a structured plan to improve natural language interaction in domestic service robots, but it is incremental as it builds on existing insights without introducing new methods or results.
The paper reviews achievements in automated speech recognition and natural language understanding in RoboCup@Home, identifies challenges in spoken human-robot interaction, and proposes a pipelined roadmap to guide research in natural language understanding for domestic service robotics.
On the one hand, speech is a key aspect to people's communication. On the other, it is widely acknowledged that language proficiency is related to intelligence. Therefore, intelligent robots should be able to understand, at least, people's orders within their application domain. These insights are not new in RoboCup@Home, but we lack of a long-term plan to evaluate this approach. In this paper we conduct a brief review of the achievements on automated speech recognition and natural language understanding in RoboCup@Home. Furthermore, we discuss main challenges to tackle in spoken human-robot interaction within the scope of this competition. Finally, we contribute by presenting a pipelined road map to engender research in the area of natural language understanding applied to domestic service robotics.