Situated Natural Language Understanding (Prof. Hozumi Tanaka)

Abstract:
To make our robot more intelligent, it has to understand a conversation through natural language. The mile stone of such an NLU system was SHRDLU system developed at MIT more than 30 years ago. NLU research environment has changed drastically in the past two decade.  Not only tremendous amount of computing power but also better technologies in speech recognition, natural language processing and computer graphics are now available. The advancement in such technologies enables to build a next-generation NLU system, where situated natural language understanding will be the most important research theme.  In this talk we will explain why the situated natural language understanding is so important and difficult. Along with showing some examples, we will give you a few of solutions obtained thus far through our NLU research.

Hozumi Tanaka was born in Japan on October 02, 1941. He graduated from Department of control engineering, Faculty of Engineering, Tokyo Institute of Technology in 1964, and completed his Master’s degree in 1966. He joined Electrotechnical Laboratory of Ministry of Trade and Industry (MITI) in 1966, where he engaged in developing a TSS and natural language processing systems, the latter of which has been his current main research theme. He became a chief of machine inference section and received his Dr. of Eng. from Tokyo Institute of Technology in 1980. He joined the Fifth Generation Computer Project supported by MITI from 1983 to 1992.  He moved from Electrotechnical Laboratory to Tokyo Institute of Technology in 1983 and retired from the Institute in 2005. Since April 2001, he has conducted a 5-year project named “Natural Language Understanding and Action Control”  supported by the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology and Japan Society for the Promotion of Sciences. At present, he is a professor of Department of Information Science at Chukyo University.