Sean Trott

Each year, ICSI holds an open house in conjunction with the Berkeley EECS Annual Research Symposium, or BEARS. At this year's open house, on Thursday, February 12 at 12:45 p.m., our researchers are going to present their work in areas as diverse as as speech recognition, big data, image sentiment analysis, and linguistics. We thought we'd give you some previews of the demonstrations and posters that our researchers will be showing throughout the afternoon.

Sean Trott, a member of our Artificial Intelligence Group, will be demonstrating a simulated robot model that is able to respond to natural language. The title and abstract for his demonstration are below, along with some previews of what you'll see if you stop by his table on February 12.

Learn more about ICSI's 2015 BEARS Open House.

Domain-Specific Applications of Embodied Construction Grammar

Embodied Construction Grammar (ECG) offers a neurologically plausible model of language use. Like other construction grammars, ECG operates on the assumption that language is composed of form-meaning pairings; in ECG, constructions bind grammatical constituents to roles in complex schema hierarchies, and the ECG Analyzer parses input utterances and outputs a Semantic Specification (SemSpec) illustrating these pairings. ECG focuses particularly on simulation-based semantics; thus, in this talk, I will focus on two distinct domains to which we have applied ECG. First, I will describe a robot task, in which natural language is used to give commands to a simulated robot model; this is a modular system that demonstrates how ECG can be used to drive action from language. Second, I will describe an implementation for metaphor analysis, in which the system uses ECG for metaphor identification and analysis, and is able to construct a database of utterances and associated metaphor bindings. Both systems are implemented and fully functional.

The simulated robot environment
Sample output from the ECG Analyzer. Full size (.png).	The ECG Workbench. Full size (.pdf)
Diagram of the different component parts of the system.