Developing of Natural Language Interface to Robot - an Arabic Language Case Study

Abstract

In this paper, we report the development of an Arabic natural language interface to robot (ANLI2ROBOT). The imperative sentence in Arabic language is used to command a robot lifting arm to grasp small metal objects and move them from one place to another. Since this interface is a natural language processing (NLP) application, lexicon, syntactical, and morphological subsystems for the Arabic language interrogative sentence were created as components of this interface. A set of simple familiar Arabic command words, which are related to the operations of the robot lifting arm, have been defined in the lexicon of the interface, and different forms of these words have been created by using the morphological subsystem. ANLI2ROBOT is implemented using Prolog programming language since it gives a straightforward conversion from Definite Clause Grammar (DCG) to Prolog predicates. This work, which is classified as human–robot interaction (HRI), contributes the using of Arabic language to communicate with robot. ANLI2ROBOT is also considered as a written dialogue system (WDS) that uses Arabic written (not spoken) language. In addition to the success in handling the different forms of the imperative sentence, the work revealed other significant findings regarding the use of the Arabic natural language to instruct the robot (and similar machines).