Learning what to talk about in descriptive games

Proceedings of the 25th International Conference on Machine Learning - ICML '08

2008

336

308

We present a novel commentator system that learns language from sportscasts of simulated soccer games. The system learns to parse and generate commentaries without any engineered knowledge about the English language. Training is done using only ambiguous supervision in the form of textual human commentaries and simulation states of the soccer games. The system simultaneously tries to establish correspondences between the commentaries and the simulation states as well as build a translation model. We also present a novel algorithm, Iterative Generation Strategy Learning (IGSL), for deciding which events to comment on. Human evaluations of the generated commentaries indicate they are of reasonable quality compared to human commentaries.

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Learning to sportscast

Chen

Proceedings of the 25th International Conference on Machine Learning - ICML '08

2008

336

308

“…There has been some recent work on learning strategic generation using reinforcement learning (Zaragoza & Li, 2005). This work involves a game setting where the speaker must aid the listener in reaching a given destination while avoiding obstacles.…”

Section: Natural Language Generationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Training a Multilingual Sportscaster: Using Perceptual Context to Learn Language

Chen

Kim

2010

jair

We present a novel framework for learning to interpret and generate language using only perceptual context as supervision. We demonstrate its capabilities by developing a system that learns to sportscast simulated robot soccer games in both English and Korean without any language-specific prior knowledge. Training employs only ambiguous supervision consisting of a stream of descriptive textual comments and a sequence of events extracted from the simulation trace. The system simultaneously establishes correspondences between individual comments and the events that they describe while building a translation model that supports both parsing and generation. We also present a novel algorithm for learning which events are worth describing. Human evaluations of the generated commentaries indicate they are of reasonable quality and in some cases even on par with those produced by humans for our limited domain.

Learning Language from Its Perceptual Context

Machine Learning and Knowledge Discovery in Databases

Current systems that learn to process natural language require laboriously constructed human-annotated training data. Ideally, a computer would be able to acquire language like a child by being exposed to linguistic input in the context of a relevant but ambiguous perceptual environment. As a step in this direction, we present a system that learns to sportscast simulated robot soccer games by example. The training data consists of textual human commentaries on Robocup simulation games. A set of possible alternative meanings for each comment is automatically constructed from game event traces. Our previously developed systems for learning to parse and generate natural language (KRISP and WASP) were augmented to learn from this data and then commentate novel games. The system is evaluated based on its ability to parse sentences into correct meanings and generate accurate descriptions of game events. Human evaluation was also conducted on the overall quality of the generated sportscasts and compared to human-generated commentaries.