In order for robots to engage in dialog with human teammates, they must have the ability to identify correspondences between elements of language and aspects of the external world. A solution to this symbol grounding problem (Harnad, 1990) would enable a robot to interpret commands such as "Drive over to receiving and pick up the tire pallet." This article describes several of our results that use probabilistic inference to address the symbol grounding problem. Our approach is to develop models that factor according to the linguistic structure of a command. We first describe an early result, a generative model that factors according to the sequential structure of language, then discuss our new framework, Generalized Grounding Graphs (G 3 ). The G 3 framework dynamically instantiates a probabilistic graphical model for a natural language input, enabling a mapping between words in language and concrete objects, places, paths and events in the external world. We report on corpus-based experiments in which the robot is able to learn and use word meanings in three real-world tasks: indoor navigation, spatial language video retrieval, and mobile manipulation.

This paper describes a new model for understanding natural language commands given to autonomous systems that perform navigation and mobile manipulation in semi-structured environments. Previous approaches have used models with fixed structure to infer the likelihood of a sequence of actions given the environment and the command. In contrast, our framework, called Generalized Grounding Graphs, dynamically instantiates a probabilistic graphical model for a particular natural language command according to the command's hierarchical and compositional semantic structure. Our system performs inference in the model to successfully find and execute plans corresponding to natural language commands such as "Put the tire pallet on the truck." The model is trained using a corpus of commands collected using crowdsourcing. We pair each command with robot actions and use the corpus to learn the parameters of the model. We evaluate the robot's performance by inferring plans from natural language commands, executing each plan in a realistic robot simulator, and asking users to evaluate the system's performance. We demonstrate that our system can successfully follow many natural language commands from the corpus.

The use of machine learning (ML) has become more widespread in many areas of consumer financial services, including credit underwriting and pricing of loans. ML’s ability to automatically learn nonlinearities and interactions in training data is perceived to facilitate faster and more accurate credit decisions, and ML is now a viable challenger to traditional credit modeling methodologies. In this mini review, we further the discussion of ML in consumer finance by proposing uniform definitions of key ML and legal concepts related to discrimination and interpretability. We use the United States legal and regulatory environment as a foundation to add critical context to the broader discussion of relevant, substantial, and novel ML methodologies in credit underwriting, and we review numerous strategies to mitigate the many potential adverse implications of ML in consumer finance.

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