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<Paper uid="C04-1049">
  <Title>Talking Robots With LEGO MindStorms</Title>
  <Section position="7" start_page="0" end_page="0" type="concl">
    <SectionTitle>
5 Conclusion
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    <Paragraph position="0"> The robots we developed together with our students were toy robots, looked like toy robots, and could (given the limited resources) only deal with toy examples. However, they confirmed that there are affordable COTS components on the market with which we can, even in a limited amount of time, build engaging talking robots that capture the essence of various (potential) real-life applications.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> The chess and shell game players could be used as entertainment robots. The labyrinth and pyramid robots could be extended into tackling real-world exploration or rescue tasks, in which robots search for disaster victims in environments that are too dangerous for rescuers to venture into.8 Dialogue capabilities are useful in such applications not just to communicate with the human operator, but also possibly with disaster victims, to check their condition. null Moreover, despite the small scale of these robots, they show genuine issues that could provide interesting lines of research at the interface between robotics and computational linguistics, and in computational linguistics as such. Each of our robots could be improved dramatically on the dialogue side in many ways. As we have demonstrated that the equipment for building talking robots is affordable today, we invite all dialogue researchers to join us in making such improvements, and in investigating the specific challenges that the combination of robotics and dialogue bring about. For instance, a robot moves and acts in the real world (rather than a carefully controlled computer system), and suffers from uncertainty about its surroundings. This limits the ways in which the dialogue designer can use visual context information to help with reference resolution. null Robots, being embodied agents, present a host of new challenges beyond the challenges we face in computational linguistics. The interpretation of language needs to be grounded in a way that is both based in perception, and on conceptual structures to allow for generalization over experiences. Naturally, this problem extends to the acquisition of language, where approaches such as (Nicolescu and Matari'c, 2001; Carbonetto and Freitos, 2003; Oates, 2003) have focused on basing understanding entirely in sensory data.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="2"> Another interesting issue concerns the interpretation of deictic references. Research in multi-modal  interfaces has addressed the issue of deictic reference, notably in systems that allow for pen-input (see (Oviatt, 2001)). Embodied agents raise the complexity of the issues by offering a broader range of sensory input that needs to be combined (crossmodally) in order to establish possible referents. Acknowledgments. The authors would like to thank LEGO and CLT Sprachtechnologie for providing free components from which to build our robot systems. We are deeply indebted to our students, who put tremendous effort into designing and building the presented robots. Further information about the student projects (including a movie) is available at the course website, http://www.coli.unisb.de/cl/courses/lego-02. null</Paragraph>
  </Section>
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