In the ongoing evolution of human-robot interaction, one of the central goals of research remains enabling robots to understand instructions specified in natural language. Most current real-world robot systems are either built to solve one particular
Why robotics and language need each other
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When Stefanie Tellex was 10 or 12, around 1990, she learned to program. Her great-aunt had given her instructional books and she would type code into her father s desktop computer. One program she typed in was a famous artificial intelligence program called ELIZA, which aped a psychotherapist. Tellex would tap out questions, and ELIZA would respond with formulaic text answers. I was just fascinated with the idea that a computer could talk to you, Tellex says, that a computer could be alive, like a person is alive. Even ELIZA s rote answers gave her a glimmer of what might be possible.