Experience with sitting, for example - the kind of experience a disembodied Siri or Alexa doesn’t have - might help a robot identify and fetch a chair or some suitable alternative when it’s asked for one.īeing physically embedded in the world could also help robots deal with the fact that much of our language (and perhaps even our thought) is metaphorical.
Imagine an 80-year-old asking her home-care robot to cook something new for lunch: “I’m tired of tomato soup make me a sandwich.” Well, Matuszek says, “if it’s like, ‘Okay, I’m gonna have to call a team of programmers for that,’ that’s not a useful robot.”įood & Environment Why solar geoengineering should be part of the climate crisis solutionĪt the same time, however, Tellex and her coauthors emphasize that a robot’s ability to follow natural-language commands - “words to world,” we might call it - can reinforce its ability to understand those commands: world to words. That’s especially true in situations such as elder care, adds coauthor Cynthia Matuszek, a roboticist at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. “Language is the right interface when you have untrained users, under high cognitive load, interacting with a system that’s really complicated,” Tellex says. From a practical standpoint, language offers an intuitive way for users to guide machines in a host of applications, including home care, factories, surgical suites, search and rescue, construction, tutoring and autonomous vehicles. Tellex, who is now at Brown University, combines both her interests in “ Robots That Use Language,” a survey that she and three colleagues published in the 2020 Annual Review of Control, Robotics, and Autonomous Systems. “And that felt really right to me,” she says. So to master language, Roy was saying, computers might need such experience, too. Language is about something - an object, an event, an intent, all of which we learn through experience and interaction. You have to be connected to the world,” Tellex says. He told her: “Yeah, what’s missing is perception and action. It just felt like something was fundamentally missing in terms of what language is.”įor her PhD, Tellex worked with Deb Roy at the MIT Media Lab, who shared her disillusionment. “It basically boiled down to counting up how many words appeared with other words, and then trying to produce an answer based on statistics. For one project, she wrote an algorithm that answered questions about a block of text, replying to a question such as “Who shot Lincoln?” with “John Wilkes Booth.” But “I got really disillusioned with it,” Tellex says. In college, Tellex worked on computational linguistics.
Gobot language series#
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