Title: Natural Language in Virtual Context: Unsupervised learning of the meanings of English words and phrases from dialogue in a virtual restaurant

Speaker: Hilke Reckman, MIT Media Lab & SAS Institute

Time: Tuesday, May 7 at 15:15 - 16:00

Location: "Lille IT auditorium no. 104", Incuba Science Park, Katrinebjerg (Åbogade 15, Building 5510).

Abstract: Natural Language Processing (NLP) is a thriving field, with recent successes such as IBM Watson outperforming humans at Jeopardy! Yet the computational modeling of how we humans learn and understand our languages still remains a formidable challenge. Most approaches rely mostly on text data, without much of the physical and behavioral context that plays an important role in our everyday interactions.  
Especially for language acquisition it is crucial to not only observe what people say, but also what they do when they say it. In this talk I present a dataset that was collected through 'The Restaurant Game'.  
Thousands of people played the roles of the customer and the waitress in a virtual restaurant online. Their actions in this virtual environment provide context for their dialogue. This dataset gives us insight into natural language in context, while circumventing the complexities of computer vision. I show that meanings of words and phrases can be automatically learned from the dialogue and actions in this restaurant scenario, with fairly simple methods and very basic initial assumptions.

Host: Peter Bro Miltersen