Can a Robot Learn a Language the Way a Child Does?

MIT researchers have devised a way to train semantic parsers by mimicking the way a child learns language. 'The system observes captioned videos and associates the words with recorded actions and objects,' ZDNet reports, citing the paper presented this week. 'It could make it easier to train parsers, and it could potentially improve human interactions with robots.' From the report: To train their parser, the researchers combined a semantic parser with a computer vision component trained in object, human and activity recognition in video. Next, they compiled a dataset of about 400 videos depicting people carrying out actions such as picking up an object or walking toward an object. Participants on the crowdsourcing platform Mechanical Turk to wrote 1,200 captions for those videos, 840 of which were set aside for training and tuning. The rest were used for testing. By associating the words with the actions and objects in a video, the parser learns how sentences are structured. With that training, it can accurately predict the meaning of a sentence without a video.

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