Semantic Map-based Generation of Navigation Instructions

Chengzu Li, Chao Zhang, Simone Teufel, Rama Sanand Doddipatla, Svetlana Stoyanchev


Abstract
We are interested in the generation of navigation instructions, either in their own right or as training material for robotic navigation task. In this paper, we propose a new approach to navigation instruction generation by framing the problem as an image captioning task using semantic maps as visual input. Conventional approaches employ a sequence of panorama images to generate navigation instructions. Semantic maps abstract away from visual details and fuse the information in multiple panorama images into a single top-down representation, thereby reducing computational complexity to process the input. We present a benchmark dataset for instruction generation using semantic maps, propose an initial model and ask human subjects to manually assess the quality of generated instructions. Our initial investigations show promise in using semantic maps for instruction generation instead of a sequence of panorama images, but there is vast scope for improvement. We release the code for data preparation and model training at https://github.com/chengzu-li/VLGen.
Anthology ID:
2024.lrec-main.1274
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024)
Month:
May
Year:
2024
Address:
Torino, Italia
Editors:
Nicoletta Calzolari, Min-Yen Kan, Veronique Hoste, Alessandro Lenci, Sakriani Sakti, Nianwen Xue
Venues:
LREC | COLING
SIG:
Publisher:
ELRA and ICCL
Note:
Pages:
14628–14640
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.lrec-main.1274
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Chengzu Li, Chao Zhang, Simone Teufel, Rama Sanand Doddipatla, and Svetlana Stoyanchev. 2024. Semantic Map-based Generation of Navigation Instructions. In Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024), pages 14628–14640, Torino, Italia. ELRA and ICCL.
Cite (Informal):
Semantic Map-based Generation of Navigation Instructions (Li et al., LREC-COLING 2024)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.lrec-main.1274.pdf