"Natural Language Communications in Computer Games"

Supervised by Y.Wilks

Abstract

Natural language communication between a human and a computer is a field of research that has been ongoing for the past few decades. Even with the advances in technology over the previous decade or so, linguistic communication between a human and a computer is still considered to be a difficult task.

The aim of this project is to develop a game that interacts with a human player through natural language, in particular by receiving requests from the player and acting on them.

It is important to note that natural language consists of many words corresponding to the same meaning and also that the meaning of a sentence can be acquired by ordering the words in different ways. It follows from this that the player's request can be said in many different ways. The game is required to act on these requests regardless of how it is said.

The final product was tested by 10 people who entered 150 sentences into it. Out of these, 123 (82%) resulted in a correct response from the game and 27 (18%) resulted in an incorrect response. It was found that from the 27 sentences resulting in incorrect responses, 17 were not understood by the game and so no actions took place. However, the other 10 sentences resulted in the wrong actions taking place, so the game acted differently to what the player expected.