An Incremental Dialogue System for Learning Visually Grounded Language (demonstration system)

We present a multi-modal dialogue system for interactive learning of perceptually grounded word meanings from a human tutor. The system integrates an incremental, semantic, and bi-directional grammar framework – Dynamic Syntax and Type Theory with Records (DS-TTR1, (Eshghi et al., 2012; Kempson et al., 2001)) – with a set of visual classifiers that are learned throughout the interaction and which ground the semantic/contextual representations that it produces (c.f. Kennington & Schlangen (2015)) Our approach extends Dobnik et al. (2012) in integrating perception (vision in this case) and language within a single formal system: Type Theory with Records (TTR (Cooper, 2005)). The combination of deep semantic representations in TTR with an incremental grammar (Dynamic Syntax) allows for complex multi-turn dialogues to be parsed and generated (Eshghi et al., 2015). These include clarification interaction, corrections, ellipsis, and utterance continuations (see e.g. the dialogue in Fig. 1)