Building Multimodal Simulations for Natural Language

In this tutorial, we introduce a computational framework and modeling language (VoxML) for composing multimodal simulations of natural language expressions within a 3D simulation environment (VoxSim). We demonstrate how to construct voxemes, which are visual object representations of linguistic entities. We also show how to compose events and actions over these objects, within a restricted domain of dynamics. This gives us the building blocks to simulate narratives of multiple events or participate in a multimodal dialogue with synthetic agents in the simulation environment. To our knowledge, this is the first time such material has been presented as a tutorial within the CL community. This will be of relevance to students and researchers interested in modeling actionable language, natural language communication with agents and robots, spatial and temporal constraint solving through language, referring expression generation, embodied cognition, as well as minimal model creation. Multimodal simulation of language, particularly motion expressions, brings together a number of existing lines of research from the computational linguistic, semantics, robotics, and formal logic communities, including action and event representation (Di Eugenio, 1991), modeling gestural correlates to NL expressions (Kipp et al., 2007; Neff et al., 2008), and action event modeling (Kipper and Palmer, 2000; Yang et al., 2015). We combine an approach to event modeling with a scene generation approach akin to those found in work by (Coyne and Sproat, 2001; Siskind, 2011; Chang et al., 2015). Mapping natural language expressions through a formal model and a dynamic logic interpretation into a visualization of the event described provides an environment for grounding concepts and referring expressions that is interpretable by both a computer and a human user. This opens a variety of avenues for humans to communicate with computerized agents and robots, as in (Matuszek et al., 2013; Lauria et al., 2001), (Forbes et al., 2015), and (Deits et al., 2013; Walter et al., 2013; Tellex et al., 2014). Simulation and automatic visualization of events from natural language descriptions and supplementary modalities, such as gestures, allows humans to use their native capabilities as linguistic and visual interpreters to collaborate on tasks with an artificial agent or to put semantic intuitions to the test in an environment where user and agent share a common context. In previous work (Pustejovsky and Krishnaswamy, 2014; Pustejovsky, 2013a), we introduced a method for modeling natural language expressions within a 3D simulation environment built on top of the game development platform Unity (Goldstone, 2009). The goal of that work was to evaluate, through explicit visualizations of linguistic input, the semantic presuppositions inherent in the different lexical choices of an utterance. This work led to two additional lines of research: an explicit encoding for how an object is itself situated relative to its environment; and an operational characterization of how an object changes its location or how an agent acts on an object over time, e.g., its affordance structure. The former has developed into a semantic notion of situational context, called a habitat (Pustejovsky, 2013a; McDonald and Pustejovsky, 2014), while the latter is addressed by dynamic interpretations of event structure (Pustejovsky and Moszkowicz, 2011; Pustejovsky and Krishnaswamy, 2016b; Pustejovsky, 2013b). The requirements on building a visual simulation from language include several components. We require a rich type system for lexical items and their composition, as well as a language for modeling the dynamics of events, based on Generative Lexicon (GL). Further, a minimal embedding space (MES) for the simulation must be determined. This is the 3D region within which the state is configured or the event unfolds. Object-based attributes for participants in a situation or event also need to be specified; e.g., orientation, relative size, default position or pose, etc. The simulation establishes an epistemic condition on the object and event rendering, imposing an implicit point of view (POV). Finally, there must be some sort of agent-dependent embodiment; this determines the relative scaling of an agent and its event participants and their surroundings, as it engages in the environment. In order to construct a robust simulation from linguistic input, an event and its participants must be embedded within an appropriate minimal embedding space. This must sufficiently enclose the event localization, while optionally including space enough for a frame of reference for the event (the viewerâ€™s perspective). We first describe the formal multimodal foundations for the modeling language, VoxML, which creates a minimal simulation from the linguistic input interpreted by the multimodal language, DITL. We then describe VoxSim, the compositional modeling and simulation environment, which maps the minimal VoxML model of the linguistic utterance to a simulation in Unity. This knowledge includes specification of object affordances, e.g., what actions are possible or enabled by use an object. VoxML (Pustejovsky and Krishnaswamy, 2016b; Pustejovsky and Krishnaswamy, 2016a) encodes semantic knowledge of real-world objects represented as 3D models, and of events and attributes related to and enacted over these objects. VoxML goes beyond the limitations of existing 3D visual markup languages by allowing for the encoding of a broad range of semantic knowledge that can be exploited by a simulation platform such as VoxSim. VoxSim (Krishnaswamy and Pustejovsky, 2016a; Krishnaswamy and Pustejovsky, 2016b) uses object and event semantic knowledge to generate animated scenes in real time without a complex animation interface. It uses the Unity game engine for graphics and I/O processing and takes as input a simple natural language utterance. The parsed utterance is semantically interpreted and transformed into a hybrid dynamic logic representation (DITL), and used to generate a minimal simulation of the event when composed with VoxML knowledge. 3D assets and VoxML-modeled nominal objects and events are created with other Unity-based tools, and VoxSim uses the entirety of the composed information to render a visualization of the described event. The tutorial participants will learn how to build simulatable objects, compose dynamic event structures, and simulate the events running over the objects. The toolkit consists of object and program (event) composers and the runtime environment, which allows for the user to directly manipulate the objects, or interact with synthetic agents in VoxSim. As a result of this tutorial, the student will acquire the following skill set: take a novel object geometry from a library and model it in VoxML; apply existing library behaviors (actions or events) to the new VoxML object; model attributes of new objects as well as introduce novel attributes; model novel behaviors over objects. The tutorial modules will be conducted within a build image of the software. Access to libraries will be provided by the instructors. No knowledge of 3D modeling or the Unity platform will be required.