Overview:

Understanding natural language, reasoning, and acting in the world have been long recognized as fundamental phenomena of intelligence. Much progress has been made in understanding them from a computational perspective. Unfortunately, the theories that have emerged for the phenomena are somewhat disparate. We have very little understanding for how having a model of the world — concepts, objects and relations — contributes to understanding the meaning of natural language utterances about this world.

In this project we study, within an integrated framework, the problem of understanding language in the context of acting in the world, and of acting and reasoning from representations generated by natural language interactions. We focus our study, at this point, on the question of how to interpret natural language instructions with respect to a world, and how to represent this interpretation as an actionable language.

We attempt to address questions such as: (1) how can experimenting with a world model can help to improve the understanding of natural language utterances about it and (2) how a reasoning and acting agents can gain from “being told", in natural language, about the world and from advice about strategies and rules of behavior.