SEAFACT: Semantic Analysis for Animation of Cooking Tasks

SEAFACT is a natural language interface to a computer-generated animation system. SEAFACT operates in the domain of cooking tasks. The domain is limited to a mini-world consisting of a small set of verbs which were chosen because they involve rather complex arm movements which will be interesting to animate. A linguistic analysis of the language found in recipes, included here, was used to define the domain. SEAFACT allows the user to specify tasks in this domain, using a small subset of English. The system then analyzes the English input and produces a representation of the task which can drive lower level motion synthesis procedures. The output of the system contains sufficient non-geometric information needed to schedule task start and end times, describe concurrent actions, and provide reach, grasp, and motion goals.