Playing with Embeddings : Evaluating embeddings for Robot Language Learning through MUD Games

Abstract

Acquiring language provides a ubiquitous mode of communication, across humans and robots. To this effect, distributional representations of words based on cooccurrence statistics, have provided significant advancements ranging across machine translation to comprehension. In this paper, we study the suitability of using general purpose word-embeddings for language learning in robots. We propose using text-based games as a proxy to evaluating word embedding on real robots. Based in a risk-reward setting, we review the effectiveness of the embeddings in navigating tasks in fantasy games, as an approximation to their performance on more complex scenarios, like language assisted robot navigation.