SIGdial 2016

We present a multi-modal dialogue system for interactive learning of perceptually grounded word meanings from a human tutor. The system integrates an incremental, semantic parsing/generation frame-work - Dynamic Syntax and Type Theory with Records (DS-TTR) - with a set of visual classifiers that are learned through-out the interaction and which ground the meaning representations that it produces. We use this system in interaction with a simulated human tutor to study the effects of different dialogue policies and capabilities on accuracy of learned meanings, learning rates, and efforts/costs to the tutor. We show that the overall performance of the learning agent is affected by (1) who takes initiative in the dialogues; (2) the ability to express/use their confidence level about visual attributes; and (3) the ability to process elliptical and incrementally constructed dialogue turns. Ultimately, we train an adaptive dialogue policy which optimises the trade-off between classifier accuracy and tutoring costs.