Alane Suhr
Learning and Using Natural Language in Interaction
Learning to use language in interactions by using language in interactions
I will discuss grounded natural language instruction-following in collaborative interactions. First, I will describe CerealBar, a new environment and task for studying grounded natural language interaction. In the CerealBar game, two players, a leader and a follower, work together to collect sets of matching cards by moving through a 3D environment. The game incentivizes collaboration through natural language instruction. I will describe an automated system which follows human-written instructions in CerealBar. Second, I will discuss recent work that investigates the kind of language people use in CerealBar through the lifetime of a community of players, with the surprising result that as the community ages, instructions written by leaders become more complex. Finally, I will discuss an upcoming TACL paper where we use interaction with human followers to train a system that generates instructions in CerealBar.
Alane is a final-year PhD student at Cornell University (based in NYC at Cornell Tech) advised by Yoav Artzi. Alane’s interests are language grounding, including language in interactions, semantic parsing, and visual reasoning.