Cynthia Matuszek

Affiliated Faculty, Assistant Professor, Faculty

Home cmat@umbc.edu

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My primary research interests are in robotics and natural language processing; in my work, I combine these interests to support research in human-robot interaction, or HRI. My work focuses on the problem of grounded language acquisition: extracting semantically meaningful representations of human language by mapping those representations to the noisy, unpredictable physical world in which robots operate. More specifically, I work on combining probabilistic, grammar-based natural language processing with machine learning to transform human communication into a formal language that a robot can understand. I have looked at using this kind of language learning to learn how to follow navigation instructions or learn more about the world from human users by learning to extend a world model in tandem with learning a language parsing model.