Abstract
This paper describes a system for playing a digital version of a board game using natural language. We consider the control of the game through players interacting with a 2D graphical interface by typing in appropriate text instructions. Such an input is syntactically parsed using a set of pushdown transducers to generate a simplified string representation of the original user’s sentence. Further, a semantic parser splits the new input representation into a series of frames, each one representing the semantics of the underlying text chunks. Based on the game logic and according to context information, we resolve ambiguities and incompleteness within these data structures and generate a set of possible game instructions. Eventually, we check preconditions related to the validity of the hypothesized commands and, if the preconditions are met, the equivalent instructions are carried out and the game state is updated. For testing purposes, we fed our system with game instructions that are automatically generated by an equivalent context free grammar that can be described by our pushdown transducers. In the case of parseable instructions, the system has been shown to properly perform with over 98% accuracy. The application can be played over the network based on a client/server architecture where players exchange periodic updates through a central host.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
http://java.sun.com/javase/technologies/core/basic/rmi/index.jsp
Abney, S.: Partial Parsing via Finite-State Cascades. In: Proceedings of the ESSLLI Robust Parsing Workshop, pp. 8–15 (1996)
Allen, J.: Natural Language Understanding, 2nd edn. Addison Wesley, Reading (1994)
Castronova, E.: Synthetic Worlds: The Business and Culture of Online Games. University of Chicago Press, Chicago (2005)
Cheyer, A., Martin, D.: The Open Agent Architecture, Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems 4(1-2), 143–148 (2001)
Delest, M.P., Viennot, G.: Algebraic Languages and Polyominoes Enumeration. Theoretical Computer Science 34, 169–206 (1984)
DePristo, M., Zubek, R.: being-in-the-world. In: Proceedings of the AAAI Spring Symposium. On AI and Interactive Entertainment (2001)
Fernández, R., Lucht, T., RodrÃguez, K., Schlangen, D.: Interaction in Task-Oriented Human-Human Dialogue: The Effects of Different Turn-Taking Policies. In: Proceedings of the 1st Intern. IEEE/ACL Workshop on Spoken Language Technology, Palm Beach, Aruba (2006)
Fernández, R., Corradini, A., Schlangen, D., Stede, M.: Towards Reducing and Managing Uncertainty in Spoken Dialogue Systems. In: Proceedings of the 7th International Workshop on Computational Semantics, Tilburg, The Netherlands (2007)
Fletcher, J.G.: A Program to Solve the Pentomino Problem by the Recursive Use of Macros. Communications of the ACM 8(10), 621–623 (1965)
Gabsdil, M., Koller, A., Striegnitz, K.: Natural language and inference in a computer game. In: Proceedings of COLING, Taipei (2002)
Golomb, W.S.: Polyominoes, 2nd edn. Princeton University Press, Princeton (1994)
Grünbaum, B., Shephard, G.C.: Tilings & Patterns. W.H. Freeman and Company, New York (1987)
Hlubocky, B., Amir, E.: Knowledge-gathering agents in adventure Games. In: AAAI Workshop on Challenges in Game AI, AAAI Press, Stanford, California, USA (2004)
Johnston, M., Cohen, P.R., McGee, D., Oviatt, S.L., Pittman, J.A., Smith, I.: Unification-based Multimodal Integration. In: Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, pp. 281–288 (1997)
Koller, A., Debusmann, R., Gabsdil, M., Striegnitz, K.: Put My Galakmid Coin into the Dispenser and Kick It: Computational Linguistics and Theorem Proving in a Computer Game. Journal of Logic, Language and Information 13, 187–206 (2004)
Leech, G., Garside, R., Bryant, M.: CLAWS4: The tagging of the British National Corpus. In: Proceedings of the 15th International Conference on Computational Linguistics (COLING), Kyoto, Japan, pp. 622–628 (1994)
Mantion, M.E.: The Economics of Online Gaming: A White Paper Based on In-Stat/MDR’s Industry Leading Advanced Carries – Residential Research, Report No. WP030102WP (2003)
Martin, E.G.: Polyominoes: A guide to puzzles and problems in tiling, Mathematical Association of America, 2nd edn. (1996)
Mohri, M.-J., Nederhof, M.-J.: Regular approximation of context-free grammars. In: Junqua, J.-C., van Noord, G. (eds.) Robustness in Language and Speech Processingpp, pp. 251–261. Kluwer Academic Publishers, Dordrecht (2000)
Nederhof, M.-J.: Practical experiments with regular approximation of context-free languages. Computational Linguistics 26(1) (2000)
Nederhof, M.-J.: Regular approximation of CFLs: a grammatical view. In: Bunt, H., Nijholt, A. (eds.), Advances in Probabilistic and other Parsing Technologies, ch. 12, pp. 221–241, Kluwer Academic Publishers (2000)
Nielsen, J., Molich, R.: Heuristic evaluation of user interfaces. In: Proceedings of the ACM CHI Conference, Seattle, WA, pp. 249–256 (1990)
Nielsen, J.: Heuristic evaluation. In: Nielsen, J., Mack, R.L. (eds.) Usability Inspection Methods, John Wiley & Sons, New York, NY (1994)
Vogel, L.H.: Entertainment Industry Economics, 6th edn. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge (2004)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2007 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this paper
Cite this paper
Corradini, A., Bak, A., Hanneforth, T. (2007). A Natural Language Interface for a 2D Networked Game. In: Jacko, J.A. (eds) Human-Computer Interaction. HCI Applications and Services. HCI 2007. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 4553. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-73111-5_26
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-73111-5_26
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-540-73109-2
Online ISBN: 978-3-540-73111-5
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)