116 - Grounded Language Understanding, with Yonatan Bisk

We invited Yonatan Bisk to talk about grounded language
understanding. We started off by discussing an overview of the
topic, its research goals, and the the challenges involved. In the
latter half of the conversation, we talked about ALFRED (Shridhar
et al., 2019), a grounded instruction following benchmark that
simulates training a robot butler. The current best models built
for this benchmark perform very poorly compared to humans. We
discussed why that might be, and what could be done to improve
their performance. Yonatan Bisk is currently an assistant professor
at Language Technologies Institute at Carnegie Mellon University.
The data and the leaderboard for ALFRED can be accessed here:
https://askforalfred.com/.