Program Summary
The past few decades have seen explosive growth in the development and training of artificial intelligence (AI) systems, which are now embedded in digital computing processes spanning several key industries. One area that has benefited from AI, and specifically machine learning (ML) techniques and statistical methods, is the area of human language technology (HLT). These methods have provided significant improvements to numerous language technologies such as machine translation, information retrieval, name entity detection, event detection, knowledge base creation, and more. These technologies have been successfully deployed in government, defense, and commercial settings, such as for call centers, reservation services, and personal assistants.
However, ML suffers from a need for large amounts of annotated data for training in order to achieve the required accuracy for various applications. ML technology is also brittle, incapable of dealing with new data sources, topics, media, and vocabularies. These weaknesses of ML, as applied to natural language, are due to exclusive reliance on the statistical aspects of language, with no regard for its meaning.
The Grounded Artificial Intelligence Language Acquisition (GAILA) AI Exploration (AIE) topic aims to enable computers to acquire language in a manner similar to the way children do. Children acquire language based on their perceptions of aural and visual information about the world around them. The process of observing moving images and aligning them with auditory stimuli allows them to associate a sequence of sounds (a word) with some aspect of the concrete or abstract elements of the world that the word represents. Children learn to decipher which aspects of an observed scenario relate to the different words in the message from a tiny fraction of the examples that ML systems require. Sequencing information, variations of word forms, and other additional information help children make ever finer classifications of the concepts that they learn, about events or actions (often expressed by verbs), the objects or entities that participate in those events (typically nouns), and the attributes and relations of those entities and events (adjectives and prepositional phrases). GAILA seeks to research and develop a model for grounded language acquisition and an automated language acquisition prototype that learns to understand English text and speech, making the information more useable by automated analytics.