# Understanding Natural Language in Context

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2205.12691 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.12691/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 12 of its 23 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 25 May 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 12 of 12)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Exploring the Limits of Transfer Learning with a Unified Text-to-Text Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.10683/) (2019)
- [Habitat: A Platform for Embodied AI Research](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.01201/) (2019)
- [Vision-and-Language Navigation: Interpreting visually-grounded navigation instructions in real environments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.07280/) (2017)
- [AI2-THOR: An Interactive 3D Environment for Visual AI](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.05474/) (2017)
- [ALFRED: A Benchmark for Interpreting Grounded Instructions for Everyday Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.01734/) (2019)
- [ThreeDWorld: A Platform for Interactive Multi-Modal Physical Simulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.04954/) (2020)
- [Scene Memory Transformer for Embodied Agents in Long-Horizon Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.03878/) (2019)
- [Visual Semantic Planning using Deep Successor Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.08080/) (2017)
- [Visually-Grounded Planning without Vision: Language Models Infer Detailed Plans from High-level Instructions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.14259/) (2020)
- [Shifting the Baseline: Single Modality Performance on Visual Navigation & QA](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.00613/) (2018)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [When Prolog meets generative models: a new approach for managing knowledge and planning in robotic applications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.15049/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Recent years have seen an increasing number of applications that have a natural language interface, either in the form of chatbots or via personal assistants such as Alexa (Amazon), Google Assistant, Siri (Apple), and Cortana (Microsoft). To use these applications, a basic dialog between the robot and the human is required. While this kind of dialog exists today mainly within "static" robots that do not make any movement in the household space, the challenge of reasoning about the information conveyed by the environment increases significantly when dealing with robots that can move and manipulate objects in our home environment. In this paper, we focus on cognitive robots, which have some knowledge-based models of the world and operate by reasoning and planning with this model. Thus, when the robot and the human communicate, there is already some formalism they can use - the robot's knowledge representation formalism. Our goal in this research is to translate natural language utterances into this robot's formalism, allowing much more complicated household tasks to be completed. We do so by combining off-the-shelf SOTA language models, planning tools, and the robot's knowledge-base for better communication. In addition, we analyze different directive types and illustrate the contribution of the world's context to the translation process.