An NLP-based approach for improving human-robot interaction

This study aims to explore the possibility of improving human-robot interaction (HRI) by exploiting natural language resources and using natural language processing (NLP) methods. The theoretical basis of the study rests on the claim that effective and efficient human robot interaction requires linguistic and ontological agreement. A further claim is that the required ontology is implicitly present in the lexical and grammatical structure of natural language. The paper offers some NLP techniques to uncover (fragments of) the ontology hidden in natural language and to generate semantic representations of natural language sentences using that ontology. The paper also presents the implementation details of an NLP module capable of parsing English and Turkish along with an overview of the architecture of a robotic interface that makes use of this module for expressing the spatial motions of objects observed by a robot.