Mollie Shichman


2023

pdf
Use Defines Possibilities: Reasoning about Object Function to Interpret and Execute Robot Instructions
Mollie Shichman | Claire Bonial | Austin Blodgett | Taylor Hudson | Francis Ferraro | Rachel Rudinger
Proceedings of the 15th International Conference on Computational Semantics

Language models have shown great promise in common-sense related tasks. However, it remains unseen how they would perform in the context of physically situated human-robot interactions, particularly in disaster-relief sce- narios. In this paper, we develop a language model evaluation dataset with more than 800 cloze sentences, written to probe for the func- tion of over 200 objects. The sentences are divided into two tasks: an “easy” task where the language model has to choose between vo- cabulary with different functions (Task 1), and a “challenge” where it has to choose between vocabulary with the same function, yet only one vocabulary item is appropriate given real world constraints on functionality (Task 2). Dis- tilBERT performs with about 80% accuracy for both tasks. To investigate how annotator variability affected those results, we developed a follow-on experiment where we compared our original results with wrong answers chosen based on embedding vector distances. Those results showed increased precision across docu- ments but a 15% decrease in accuracy. We con- clude that language models do have a strong knowledge basis for object reasoning, but will require creative fine-tuning strategies in order to be successfully deployed.