Tree Substitution Grammars

The reading for Tuesday 12/3 will cover tree substitution grammars:

• Cohn, Trevor, Sharon Goldwater, and Phil Blunsom. Inducing compact but accurate tree-substitution grammars. Proceedings of Human Language Technologies: The 2009 Annual Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics. Association for Computational Linguistics, 2009.

By Sunday 12/1 at 7pm, please post a question about the paper.  By 7pm on Monday 12/2, post an answer to somebody else's question.

Deep Parsing

 This week we will read a paper on deep models for parsing:

• Recursive Deep Models for Semantic Compositionality Over a Sentiment Treebank, Richard Socher, Alex Perelygin, Jean Wu, Jason Chuang, Chris Manning, Andrew Ng and Chris Potts.  Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing.

There is a lot going on in this paper.  By Sunday night at 5pm, post a question about something in the paper.  By Monday night at 5pm, post an answer to somebody else's question. 

There is no class on Thursday.  Happy Thanksgiving!

Applications

This week the class will focus on applications.  We will read three papers, one from the supply/warehouse environment, one from a factory floor environment, and one from a household environment.  Each paper describes a robot designed for the corresponding environment.   These papers give a sense of the complexity of an end-to-end robotic system, and also some visions of the ways in which robots will impact the world. 

11/19/13 (Tues.)

• S. Teller, Matthew R. Walter, M. Antone, A. Correa, R. Davis, L. Fletcher, E. Frazzoli, J. Glass, J.P. How, A.S. Huang, J.H. Jeon, S. Karaman, B. Luders, N. Roy, and T. Sainath. A voice-commandable robotic forklift working alongside humans in minimally-prepared outdoor environments. In Proc. IEEE Int’l Conf. on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), pages 526–533, 2010.
• R. A. Knepper, T. Layton, J. Romanishin, and D. Rus. IkeaBot: An autonomous multi-robot coordinated furniture assembly system. In Proc. IEEE Int’l Conf. on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), Karlsruhe, Germany, May 2013.

11/21/13 (Thurs.)

• M. Bollini, S. Tellex, T. Thompson, N. Roy, and D. Rus. Interpreting and executing recipes with a cooking robot. In 13th International Symposium on Experimental Robotics, 2012.
• Jeremy Maitin-Shepard, Marco Cusumano-Towner, Jinna Lei and Pieter Abbeel. Cloth Grasp Point Detection based on Multiple-View Geometric Cues with Application to Robotic Towel Folding.  In the proceedings of the International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), 2010.

By Sunday night at 5pm, post a comment discussing how language can fit into these systems.  Try to identify a problem that language input or output could solve.  Then discuss a technique you might use to solve it. 

By Monday night at 5pm, post a reply to someone else's comment.  Ask a question; expand on an idea; suggest a related citation.

Language and Gesture

There is a lot going on in the reading for this week.  As you read the paper, focus on understanding what is given to the algorithm and what is being inferred by the algorithm.  What is the input and what is the output?  What are the analogs to the input and output in the language understanding domain?

Write a blog comment of about 200 words answering these questions.   Please post it by 7am on Thursday morning.

Generating Communicative Actions

This week we will read two papers focused on generating communicative actions.  The first one is currently in submission at a conference, and the second two papers were published last year at RSS and HRI by Sidd Srinivasa's group at CMU.   There is a deep mathematical connection between the two approaches, which we will discuss in class.

11/12/13 (Tues.)  Generating Language

•  Stefanie Tellex, Ross Knepper, Adrian Li, Thomas Howard, Daniela Rus, and Nicholas Roy. Asking for help using inverse semantics. (in preparation), 2014.

11/14/13 (Thurs.) Generating Motion

• A.D. Dragan, K.T. Lee and S.S. Srinivasa, "Legibility and Predictability of Robot Motion". International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction (HRI), 2013. 
• A.D. Dragan and S.S. Srinivasa, "Generating Legible Motion". Robotics: Science and Systems (R:SS), 2013.

For Tuesday, please post on the blog suggestions for improving the Tellex et al. paper.  I'm looking for about 200 words.   This paper is not yet in its final version, so your comments will help improve it.  It will also give you practice critically evaluating research which you can apply to your own work as you finish up your final projects.

Midterm Presentations

Here are the instructions for your midterm presentations next week.  Put your presentation slides in a Google Presentation in this directory:
https://drive.google.com/?pli=1&authuser=0#folders/0B3LSuLTwkM-_b3VCVVl5M0M3Tk0

Your slides must be set to auto advance.  Instructions for doing that are here:
https://support.google.com/drive/answer/1696787?hl=en

You can make the timings be whatever you like, but they must automatically advance to the next slide.  You have five minutes to present, and there will be a hard cutoff.  Following your five minute talk, there will be ten minutes for discussion, questions, and comments.  The way to be successful with this presentation format is to practice your talk.  You should practice it out loud, from start to finish, at least three times, in order to do it smoothly and get the transitions right.

Your presentation should include a table of results, with at least some results.  It's okay if the results aren't very good, but you should have at least run some algorithm on the dataset you plan to use and assessed its effectiveness.  You should also discuss your plans for the rest of the semester.

Here is the presentation schedule:

Tuesday 11/5:

• Izaak Baker and Nakul Gopalan. Athena. 
• Xiaolu Li , Zhe Zhao. Automatic Turtle Graphics. 
• Miles Eldon and Kurt Spindler. Comparing Inference Algorithms for Grounding Trajectories. 
• Yujie Wan, Lixing Lian. Learning Semantic Parser from Question­-Answer Pairs. 
• Tom Sgouros. SHRDLU updated: parsing with ambiguity and without rules

Thursday 11/7:

• Charles Yeh and Bowei Wang. Application of SHRDLU in Minecraft.
• Lauren Bilsky. Machine Translation using Grounded Language and Topic Modeling. 
• Stephen Brawner. Task-based User Modeling in Shared Autonomy. 
• Do Kook Choe. Navigation via Machine Translation. 
• Jun Ki Lee, Zhiqiang Sui. Learning Natural Language Commands for Robots in Home Environment Situations. 

Tuesday 11/12

• David Abel and Gabriel Barth-Maron 
• Andrew Kovacs and Sam Birch. Webtalk.