A natural language interface for task oriented activities

A natural language interface built for a task-oriented activity is described. The activity is operator control of equipment as required by a multi-robot experiment. TODUS, a Task-Oriented Discourse Understanding System, is an utterance-based natural language understanding system with extensive linguistic coverage. It is compact, efficient, runs on a popular PC chip and accepts spoken language. TODUS' novel architecture, an annotated session transcript and implementation data are provided. Various mechanisms which support natural language task dialog are discussed and future plans are presented.