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Turing test has been a benchmark scale for measuring the human level intelligence in computers since it was proposed by Alan Turing in 1950. However, for last 60 years, the applications such as ELIZA, PARRY, Cleverbot and Eugene Goostman, that claimed to pass the test. These applications are either based

Turing test has been a benchmark scale for measuring the human level intelligence in computers since it was proposed by Alan Turing in 1950. However, for last 60 years, the applications such as ELIZA, PARRY, Cleverbot and Eugene Goostman, that claimed to pass the test. These applications are either based on tricks to fool humans on a textual chat based test or there has been a disagreement between AI communities on them passing the test. This has led to the school of thought that it might not be the ideal test for predicting the human level intelligence in machines.

Consequently, the Winograd Schema Challenge has been suggested as an alternative to the Turing test. As opposed to deciding the intelligent behavior with the help of chat servers, like it was done in the Turing test, the Winograd Schema Challenge is a question answering test. It consists of sentence and question pairs such that the answer to the question depends on the resolution of a definite pronoun or adjective in the sentence. The answers are fairly intuitive for humans but they are difficult for machines because it requires some sort of background or commonsense knowledge about the sentence.

In this thesis, I propose a novel technique to solve the Winograd Schema Challenge. The technique has three basic modules at its disposal, namely, a Semantic Parser that parses the English text (both sentences and questions) into a formal representation, an Automatic Background Knowledge Extractor that extracts the Background Knowledge pertaining to the given Winograd sentence, and an Answer Set Programming Reasoning Engine that reasons on the given Winograd sentence and the corresponding Background Knowledge. The applicability of the technique is illustrated by solving a subset of Winograd Schema Challenge pertaining to a certain type of Background Knowledge. The technique is evaluated on the subset and a notable accuracy is achieved.
ContributorsSharma, Arpita (Author) / Baral, Chita (Thesis advisor) / Lee, Joohyung (Committee member) / Pon-Barry, Heather (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2014
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Description
While developing autonomous intelligent robots has been the goal of many research programs, a more practical application involving intelligent robots is the formation of teams consisting of both humans and robots. An example of such an application is search and rescue operations where robots commanded by humans are sent to

While developing autonomous intelligent robots has been the goal of many research programs, a more practical application involving intelligent robots is the formation of teams consisting of both humans and robots. An example of such an application is search and rescue operations where robots commanded by humans are sent to environments too dangerous for humans. For such human-robot interaction, natural language is considered a good communication medium as it allows humans with less training about the robot's internal language to be able to command and interact with the robot. However, any natural language communication from the human needs to be translated to a formal language that the robot can understand. Similarly, before the robot can communicate (in natural language) with the human, it needs to formulate its communique in some formal language which then gets translated into natural language. In this paper, I develop a high level language for communication between humans and robots and demonstrate various aspects through a robotics simulation. These language constructs borrow some ideas from action execution languages and are grounded with respect to simulated human-robot interaction transcripts.
ContributorsLumpkin, Barry Thomas (Author) / Baral, Chitta (Thesis advisor) / Lee, Joohyung (Committee member) / Fainekos, Georgios (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2012
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Description
Natural Language Processing is a subject that combines computer science and linguistics, aiming to provide computers with the ability to understand natural language and to develop a more intuitive human-computer interaction. The research community has developed ways to translate natural language to mathematical formalisms. It has not yet been shown,

Natural Language Processing is a subject that combines computer science and linguistics, aiming to provide computers with the ability to understand natural language and to develop a more intuitive human-computer interaction. The research community has developed ways to translate natural language to mathematical formalisms. It has not yet been shown, however, how to automatically translate different kinds of knowledge in English to distinct formal languages. Most of the recent work presents the problem that the translation method aims to a specific formal language or is hard to generalize. In this research, I take a first step to overcome this difficulty and present two algorithms which take as input two lambda-calculus expressions G and H and compute a lambda-calculus expression F. The expression F returned by the first algorithm satisfies F@G=H and, in the case of the second algorithm, we obtain G@F=H. The lambda expressions represent the meanings of words and sentences. For each formal language that one desires to use with the algorithms, the language must be defined in terms of lambda calculus. Also, some additional concepts must be included. After doing this, given a sentence, its representation and knowing the representation of several words in the sentence, the algorithms can be used to obtain the representation of the other words in that sentence. In this work, I define two languages and show examples of their use with the algorithms. The algorithms are illustrated along with soundness and completeness proofs, the latter with respect to typed lambda-calculus formulas up to the second order. These algorithms are a core part of a natural language semantics system that translates sentences from English to formulas in different formal languages.
ContributorsAlvarez Gonzalez, Marcos (Author) / Baral, Chitta (Thesis advisor) / Lee, Joohyung (Committee member) / Ye, Jieping (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2010
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Description
Question Answering has been under active research for decades, but it has recently taken the spotlight following IBM Watson's success in Jeopardy! and digital assistants such as Apple's Siri, Google Now, and Microsoft Cortana through every smart-phone and browser. However, most of the research in Question Answering aims at factual

Question Answering has been under active research for decades, but it has recently taken the spotlight following IBM Watson's success in Jeopardy! and digital assistants such as Apple's Siri, Google Now, and Microsoft Cortana through every smart-phone and browser. However, most of the research in Question Answering aims at factual questions rather than deep ones such as ``How'' and ``Why'' questions.

In this dissertation, I suggest a different approach in tackling this problem. We believe that the answers of deep questions need to be formally defined before found.

Because these answers must be defined based on something, it is better to be more structural in natural language text; I define Knowledge Description Graphs (KDGs), a graphical structure containing information about events, entities, and classes. We then propose formulations and algorithms to construct KDGs from a frame-based knowledge base, define the answers of various ``How'' and ``Why'' questions with respect to KDGs, and suggest how to obtain the answers from KDGs using Answer Set Programming. Moreover, I discuss how to derive missing information in constructing KDGs when the knowledge base is under-specified and how to answer many factual question types with respect to the knowledge base.

After having the answers of various questions with respect to a knowledge base, I extend our research to use natural language text in specifying deep questions and knowledge base, generate natural language text from those specification. Toward these goals, I developed NL2KR, a system which helps in translating natural language to formal language. I show NL2KR's use in translating ``How'' and ``Why'' questions, and generating simple natural language sentences from natural language KDG specification. Finally, I discuss applications of the components I developed in Natural Language Understanding.
ContributorsVo, Nguyen Ha (Author) / Baral, Chitta (Thesis advisor) / Lee, Joohyung (Committee member) / VanLehn, Kurt (Committee member) / Tran, Son Cao (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2015
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Description
Reasoning with commonsense knowledge is an integral component of human behavior. It is due to this capability that people know that a weak person may not be able to lift someone. It has been a long standing goal of the Artificial Intelligence community to simulate such commonsense reasoning abilities in

Reasoning with commonsense knowledge is an integral component of human behavior. It is due to this capability that people know that a weak person may not be able to lift someone. It has been a long standing goal of the Artificial Intelligence community to simulate such commonsense reasoning abilities in machines. Over the years, many advances have been made and various challenges have been proposed to test their abilities. The Winograd Schema Challenge (WSC) is one such Natural Language Understanding (NLU) task which was also proposed as an alternative to the Turing Test. It is made up of textual question answering problems which require resolution of a pronoun to its correct antecedent.

In this thesis, two approaches of developing NLU systems to solve the Winograd Schema Challenge are demonstrated. To this end, a semantic parser is presented, various kinds of commonsense knowledge are identified, techniques to extract commonsense knowledge are developed and two commonsense reasoning algorithms are presented. The usefulness of the developed tools and techniques is shown by applying them to solve the challenge.
ContributorsSharma, Arpita (Author) / Baral, Chitta (Thesis advisor) / Lee, Joohyung (Committee member) / Papotti, Paolo (Committee member) / Yang, Yezhou (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2019