PUBLICATION
Natural Language Goal Understanding for Smart Home Environments
Type
Conference Paper
Year
2020
Authors
Dr.-Ing. Sebastian Heil
Research Area
Event
The 10th International Conference on the Internet of Things (IoT 2020)
Published in
10th International Conference on the Internet of Things (IoT "20)
ISBN/ISSN
978-1-4503-8758-3/20/10
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Abstract
One of the main challenges of the Internet of Things (IoT) is to enable end-users without technical experience to use, control or monitor smart devices.
However, enabling end-users to interact with these smart devices in an intuitive and natural way becomes increasingly important as they become more pervasive in our homes, workplaces and public environments.
Voice-based interfaces are the emerging trend to provide a more natural human-device interaction in smart environments.
Such interfaces require Natural Language Understanding (NLU) approaches to identify the meaning of end-users' voice inputs.
Designing voice interfaces that are not limited to a small, fixed set of pre-defined commands is far from trivial.
Existing voice-based solutions in the smart home domain either restrict the end-users to follow a strict language pattern, do not support indirect goals, require a large training dataset, or need a voice assistant located in the cloud.
In this paper, we propose an approach for understanding end-users goals from voice inputs in smart homes.
Our approach alleviates the need for end-users to learn or remember concrete operations of the devices and specific words/pattern structures rather it enables them to control their smart homes based on the desired goals (effects).
We evaluate the approach through application to a collection of 253 goals from real end-users and report on quality metrics.
The results demonstrate that our solution provides a good accuracy, high precision and acceptable recall for understanding end-users goals in the smart home domain.
Reference
Noura, Mahda; Heil, Sebastian; Gaedke, Martin: Natural Language Goal Understanding for Smart Home Environments. 10th International Conference on the Internet of Things (IoT "20), 2020.
