Some of you know that I will be working this summer as an RA for Chris Potts on the grant called SUBTLE: Situation Understanding Bot Through Language and Environment.  The following brief description of the project is given at this website:

For effective human-bot communication to be possible, we must move from robust sentence processing to robust utterance understanding. Our bots must be able to decode not only what sentence the speaker used, but also what the speaker’s intentions were when he spoke. This task takes us far beyond a precise specification of the set of literal meanings of individual sentences in isolation. It pushes us well past current text processing methods. It demands that we achieve a robust and tractable computational understanding of both implicit and explicit linguistic meaning.

A daunting task, but one that I look forward to helping out with. And you can help too, by spending 10 to 20 minutes playing an online game. You’ll need a friend, and both of you will need to be connected to the internet. Click this link to play the pragBot game. Your participation will give us data for some interesting work in applied linguistic pragmatics.

Update: If you’re curious about the project, you can take a look at these slides.