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.
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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
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-73111-5_26
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