More about HKUST
Integrating NLP with ASP for Intelligent Service Robots
-------------------------------------------------------------------- ***Joint Seminar*** -------------------------------------------------------------------- The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology Department of Computer Science and Engineering Human Language Technology Center -------------------------------------------------------------------- Speaker: Professor Xiaoping CHEN University of Science and Technology of China Title: "Integrating NLP with ASP for Intelligent Service Robots" Date: Monday, 21 September 2009 Time: 4:00pm - 5:00pm Venue: Lecture Theatre F (via lifts 25/26), HKUST Abstract: A big challenge to research on service robots is the requirement of communicating with humans in a natural way, especially for complicated real-world applications where commands recognition is not sufficient. We present a first effort to tackle this challenge by integrating Natural Language Processing (NLP) as a separate module into the software architecture of a service robot. Coupled with this module, we also integrated a planning module realized with Answer Set Programming (ASP) in the architecture, aiming at more scalable and flexible planning capacity. A prototype system of a real robot has been implemented and tested in a simple home environment. Standard NLP techniques such as syntactic parsing, together with our own semantic analyzer, have been implemented in the prototype system. With these NLP techniques, the user's commands and descriptions about the environment expressed in English are transferred into logical formulas in SDRT and finally in ASP, which are fed into the task planning module, through a 5-steps procedure. ASP technique is employed for task planning, making it feasible for the robot to conduct task planning and reasoning about the actions and changes in a unified way. It is shown in case studies with the prototype system that the robot can correctly "understand" and make optimal plans for compound commands under acceptable real-time requirement, while each compound command consists of multiple atomic actions which may be interconnected with one other. Some further challenges are also identified on the basis of this work. ******************* Biography: Xiaoping Chen is a professor in School of Computer Science and Technology at University of Science and Technology of China (USTC). He received a PhD in CS from USTC, a Master in EE and a BA in Mathematics from Anhui University. Prof. Chen is currently Director of the Center for Artificial Intelligence Research, USTC. He established and has led the USTC Multi-Agent Systems Lab and robot team, WrightEagle, the first Chinese team that ever entered the international RoboCup competitions, the first Chinese legged robot team, and the first Chinese standard platform humanoid robot team, which serve as platforms for researches on Intelligent Robots and Multi-Agent Systems, especially with DEC-POMDPs, NLP, and ASP. The team has won 4 champions and 7 runner-ups in RoboCup world championships. Professor Chen is on the Editorial Board of Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research and Knowledge Engineering Review. He has been a trustee of RoboCup Federation since 2008 and was a general co-chair of RoboCup'08 and PCAR'06, a senior PC member of IJCAI'09, and a PC member of IJCAI'07, AAAI'05, AAMAS'06-'08, and many other international conferences.