@inproceedings{gaddy-klein-2019-pre,
    title = "Pre-Learning Environment Representations for Data-Efficient Neural Instruction Following",
    author = "Gaddy, David  and
      Klein, Dan",
    editor = "Korhonen, Anna  and
      Traum, David  and
      M{\`a}rquez, Llu{\'i}s",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 57th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics",
    month = jul,
    year = "2019",
    address = "Florence, Italy",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/fix-sig-urls/P19-1188/",
    doi = "10.18653/v1/P19-1188",
    pages = "1946--1956",
    abstract = "We consider the problem of learning to map from natural language instructions to state transitions (actions) in a data-efficient manner. Our method takes inspiration from the idea that it should be easier to ground language to concepts that have already been formed through pre-linguistic observation. We augment a baseline instruction-following learner with an initial environment-learning phase that uses observations of language-free state transitions to induce a suitable latent representation of actions before processing the instruction-following training data. We show that mapping to pre-learned representations substantially improves performance over systems whose representations are learned from limited instructional data alone."
}