Interactive Grounding and Inference in Instruction Following

Learning by instruction is one of the most common forms of learning, and a number of research efforts have modeled the cognitive process of instruction following, with many successes. However, most computational models remain brittle with respect to the given instructions and lack the ability to adapt dynamically to variants of the instructions. This paper aims to illustrate modeling constructs designed to make instruction following more robust, including (1) more flexible grounding of language to execution, (2) processing of instructions that allows for inference of implicit instruction knowledge, and (3) dynamic, interactive clarification of instructions during both the learning and execution stages. Examples in the context of a paired-associates task and a visual-search task are discussed.