Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Jan 2021)

Continual Learning for Grounded Instruction Generation by Observing Human Following Behavior

  • Noriyuki Kojima,
  • Alane Suhr,
  • Yoav Artzi

DOI
https://doi.org/10.1162/tacl_a_00428
Journal volume & issue
Vol. 9
pp. 1303 – 1319

Abstract

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AbstractWe study continual learning for natural language instruction generation, by observing human users’ instruction execution. We focus on a collaborative scenario, where the system both acts and delegates tasks to human users using natural language. We compare user execution of generated instructions to the original system intent as an indication to the system’s success communicating its intent. We show how to use this signal to improve the system’s ability to generate instructions via contextual bandit learning. In interaction with real users, our system demonstrates dramatic improvements in its ability to generate language over time.