International Review on Computers and Software (I.RE.CO.S.), Vol. 9, N.

7
ISSN 1828-6003 July 2014

Developing of Natural Language Interface

to Robot - an Arabic Language Case Study

Ayad T. Imam1, Thamer Al-Rousan1, Ashraf Odeh2

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). Copyright © 2014 Praise Worthy Prize S.r.l. - All rights reserved.

Keywords: Human Computer Interaction, Arabic Natural Language Interface, Natural Language
Processing, Artificial Intelligence

I. Introduction account two important aspects: (a) robust and fast

Robots, either service or personal, are a popular field
of study nowadays.
The motivations behind this popularity are the
advances achieved, especially since the revolution in
computer engineering, plus the growth in their use as
assistants in industry, helpers for the elderly and the
disabled, tour guides in museums, and many more [1]-
[4]. As use of robots increases, solutions to the
challenges emerging with the use of robots in new areas
are demanded.
A key challenge facing researchers is how to make
humans interact with robots using natural or daily human
language because many users do not have the required
programming abilities to control this complex
technology, i.e. the robot. Human–human instruction
language, through imperative sentences, is typically used
in instructing robots too.
Thus, a natural language interface with a robot would
allow users to communicate with the robot by issuing
imperative natural language sentences. Achieving this
goal will certainly lead to robots and humans joining
more in daily life.
Since mobile robots involve several subsystems,
making these machines very complex and imposing
efficient real-time communication, the development of a
natural language interface with the robot should take into
language processing by using straight forward
approaches to identify and maintain language interaction
techniques; (b) limiting the amount of information to be
submitted from the users to the robot [10].
The main objective of this paper is to develop an
Arabic natural language interface to robot. The Arabic
language is a Semitic language, with its words classified
as nouns, verbs, or particles, and it consists of 28
characters. Certain challenges exist in developing Arabic
natural language based applications (such as interfaces).
The rich morphology of the Arabic language produces
the greatest number of challenges. Suffixes (prefixes,
postfixes and infixes), for example, create such diverse
patterns of the same word (called the root), and words
change from masculine to feminine with certain suffixes.
However, this is not all; much of the written Arabic
text may appear with missed diacritics leading to the
creation of ambiguity that needs complex morphological
rules for accurate identification of the intended nouns.
Other examples of challenges come from the way that
Arabic nouns are written, in that they do not start with a
capital letter, which makes it difficult to differentiate
them from other word classes [15], [16].
Normally, humans accept the natural imperative
sentence issued by others and understand it to execute
certain instructions. Mimicking this natural approach to
apply it to a computer requires definition of the structure

Copyright © 2014 Praise Worthy Prize S.r.l. - All rights reserved

1256
 Ayad T. Imam, Thamer Al-Rousan, Ashraf Odeh
(syntax) of the imperative sentence and its other
supports, such as the morphology and semantics, among
others. Hence, the natural language imperative sentence
submitted needs to be analysed using lexical, syntactical,
and semantic knowledge. Once a sentence is
syntactically and semantically analysed under
morphology restrictions, the user’s natural language
imperative sentence is translated to appropriate robotic
commands that a robot can execute. The true robot
response to the issued imperative sentence relies on
accurately syntactically and semantically distinguishing
this sentence.
The contribution of this paper is the development of
an Arabic natural language communication instructing a
robotic arm to move several small objects from one place
to another in an experiment theatre. Our interest is in
recording the architecture of the Arabic language robot
interface and the impact of the development
programming language on such real-time applications.
This paper is a considerable extension of earlier
related works, in which no Arabic natural language robot
interface has been tested before. As far as we know, this
is the first paper of its kind focusing on using the Arabic
natural language by non-expert users for instructing a
robotic arm. The paper is organized as follows: Section II
outlines the previous related works. Section III describes
the robots and the software architecture of the interface
that processes the imperative sentence used for
commanding the robot. Section IV reports the
experiments and results. Section V concludes the
discussion and outlines future work.
II. Related Works
As fully self-ruling robotics are not developed until
now, the robot must be controlled by human. Several
modes of human–robot interaction (HRI) have been
presented for different service and personal robotic
applications.
Each one represents an approach to controlling the
robot which varies from the typical computer-based
programming approach already applied in industry.
Actually, there are three standard approaches to
controlling a robot that can be mentioned here as follows:
1. Tele-operation and Tele-presence HRI Approach:
This has been utilized to strongly control the
movements of a robot. Using tele-operation and tele-
presence, HRI has produced a successful robot
control approach. Worth to say that merging of tele-
operation and robotics results tele-robotics, which
refers to robot that can perform only the essential
tasks autonomously; i.e. not fully independent
machine. Since they work under painful and risky
conditions, tele-robotics can be considered as a more
secure and more comfortable alternative of human.
Furthermore, tele-robotics shows the ability to
produce a multipurpose machine and not an
automatic system for certain application [21]. Yet,
this approach needs much time consuming practice to
Copyright © 2014 Praise Worthy Prize S.r.l. - All rights reserved
1257
accurately master the robot. An example of an
application using this interaction mode is the
graphical user interface (GUI) used to control a
mobile robot in a cluttered laboratory environment as
developed by Fong et al [6] and Tele-robotic on
Internet to control mobile robot by F. Moutaouakkil
et al. [21]. Another example is the incorporated tele-
presence used in performing jobs in space, developed
by the Robonaut project of the National Aeronautics
and Space Administration (NASA) [5].
2. Gesturing and Imitation HRI Approach: Gesturing
and imitation are strategies used for knowledge
transfer among human beings. These strategies can be
used to teach robots certain tasks that can be
generalized to further tasks using demonstrations of
performing the task. Actually, this approach is
spontaneous in robots learning human skills, yet a
number of challenges still remain, such as correcting
wrong demonstrations and adjusting movements of
the robot which are not required [7], [17].
3. Natural Language Interface HRI (NLIHRI)
Approach: Communication using natural language
(either spoken or written) is a simple approach that
needs no new skill to be learned by the users to
quickly start using a robot; hence, this approach is the
most successful mode of interaction. Developing NLI
may come either as a standalone interface subsystem
or as a piece of a multimodal interaction system (for
example using both speech and vision components).
We can list a number of examples for multimodal
interaction such as the one used to teach a robot to
press buttons with a name and an order or the one
used for grasping tasks [9], [11], [12].
III. ANLI2ROBOT System
This paper’s aim is to develop an NLI that allows non-
technical users to command, in a laboratory, a robotic
lifting arm in two directions (forwards/backwards and
left/right). The arm is equipped with a magnetic gripper
and there are two workbenches (source and destination).
The robot is required to reach, grasp, and move an
object. Fig. 1 illustrates the robotic lifting arm used in
this research. The objects used in the study were made of
metal, so that they can be attracted by the magnetized
head of the arm, and were positioned on the source
workbench.
Fig. 1. Robot Diagram [7]
International Review on Computers and Software, Vol. 9, N. 7
 Ayad T. Imam, Thamer Al-Rousan, Ashraf Odeh
Moving an object is a two-step process where the first
step consists of positioning the magnetic head of the arm
over the object on the source workbench. The second
step begins by activating the magnetic head of the arm to
get the object from the source workbench. Generally, in
robotics, a suitable configuration of the grasping task
must be applied prior to any action.
The functionality of this experimental robot is to
grasp, lift upwards and away different small metal
objects from the source workbench to a destination
workbench using a primitive command set consisting of
six commands. The Move Object commands are
subjected to sensors (S4, S5, S6, and S7), with each of
two pairs controlling one of the two motors (M1 and M2)
responsible for moving the arm in the directions
illustrated in Table I.
TABLE I
PRIMITIVE ROBOT COMMANDS [7]
Primitive Command Mechanically Action
Move Right Turn on M1 right wise until S4 is activated
Move Left Turn on M1 left wise until S6 is activated
Move Forwards Turn on M2 right wise until S7 is activated
Move Backwards Turn on M2 left wise until S5 is activated
Lift up Magnetize the head of the arm
Put down Demagnetize the head of the arm
Fig. 2. Architecture of ANLI2ROBOT System
The developed Arabic natural language robot interface
is an information system that will receive an Arabic
imperative sentence in a natural form and carry out the
processing of it to translate it to the primitive commands
that the robot can respond to. As depicted in Fig. 2, the
system comprises the following main components:
III.1. Tokeniser
The aim of the tokenization activity is to break text
into a sequence of small meaningful units, like words,
phrases, symbols, or similar, called tokens. These tokens
are the input for the next processing step, which is the
lexical analysis. Often the tokeniser uses a simple
approach in recognizing a token; for example, tokens are
isolated by whitespace characters (spaces or line breaks).
This approach is used in natural language
programming languages. The more complicated and
special cases are addressed by other methods to fit the
tokens to a language model.
Copyright © 2014 Praise Worthy Prize S.r.l. - All rights reserved
1258
Sentence segmentation into words is a deterministic
outcome of the tokenization process to extract a list of
possible words [13]. A predicate for the tokenization of
an Arabic sentence, called sting2list, has been developed.
It has the following form: sting2list (S, L), where S is
an input sentence and L is an output list containing
separated words extracted from the sentence.
The predicate sting2list (S, L), following the flow
diagram shown in Fig. 3, receives, in string form, a
formal Arabic written sentence as the input (that is S),
and produces a list of words as the output (that is L).
Fig. 3. Tokeniser Flow Diagram
III.2. Lexicon
The lexicon is considered to be the backbone for any
NLP based system. Of course, the lexicon holds all the
definite types of knowledge, like words, affixes,
punctuation marks…etc.
Unlike other natural languages, an Arabic lexicon
mainly contains the roots of Arabic words, affixes, and
non-root based words. Some researchers have shown that
it is simpler to consider the stem instead of the root as the
basic unit of the Arabic lexicon. Due to the nature of the
Arabic language, lexicon development poses certain
challenges that lead to considering the organization of
the lexicon of the Arabic language as a set of stems that
is used by the morphology subsystem to generate
bunches of words[14][16][18].
As there is no open source tool for developing Arabic
dictionary [20], a special purpose Arabic lexicon for
ALI2RBOT has been developed. The lexicon of
ALI2ROBOT contains the roots of possible Arabic
words that could be used to communicate with the robot.
A set of predicates is developed in this research and is
used to check whether the words belong to the Arabic
language. Their semantics are:
International Review on Computers and Software, Vol. 9, N. 7
 Ayad T. Imam, Thamer Al-Rousan, Ashraf Odeh
is_verb("‫)"ﺟﻠﺐ‬.
is_verb("‫)"وﺿﻊ‬.
is_verb("‫)"ﻧﻘﻞ‬.
is_verb("‫)"ﺣﺮك‬.
is_noun("‫)"رأس‬.
is_noun("‫)"ذراع‬.
is_noun("‫)"ﺷﻲء‬.
is_noun("‫)ﺟﺴﻢ‬.
is_noun(" ‫)"ﻗﻄﻌﺔ‬.
adv_place("‫)"نيمي‬.
adv_place("‫) "راسي‬.
adv_place ("‫)"وراء‬.
adv_place ("‫)"ماما‬.
adv_place ("‫)"ﺧﻠﻒ‬.
preposition (“‫)”نم‬.
preposition (“‫)”ىلا‬.
preposition (“‫)”نع‬.
preposition (“‫)”ىلع‬.
preposition (“‫)”ﻓﻲ‬.
There are three short vowels (harakat), which are /a, u,
i/ in Arabic. Although they are important in standard
Arabic, these harakat have been ignored in our research
due to the simple words used in composing the Arabic
imperative sentence to control the robot.
III.3. Morphology
Morphology is a grammatical area concerned with the
study of the formation and internal structure of words.
Word formation in a language is achieved via
inflection, derivation, compounding, and cliticization.
Regardless of their disputes regarding other
definitions, linguists generally concur that morphology is
the study of how words are composed of meaningful
elements called morphemes. While the morpheme is the
most important and the smallest unit of morphological
analysis, it is also the minimal unit of a language bearing
meaning [14], [16], [18].
Actually, morphemes are classified into two classes:
the first is the stem, which is the crucial component
morpheme of the word that delivers the meaning; the
second is the affix (prefix, suffix, circumfix, or infix),
which is the morsel morpheme joined with a stem to give
the word a new meaning and a new grammatical function
[15], [18].
By morphological parsing, the word’s surface is
decomposed to its components (stem and affixes) and
underlying structure (parts and their relationships). A
morphological parser requires both a lexicon that
contains stems and affixes and morphotactics of the
language that are the models of how an affix morphemes
to a stem. English is a somewhat uncomplicated
language, for example it does not typically have more
than four or five affixes. Other languages, like Arabic,
have much more complicated form varying methods than
English in building words [14], [19].
The morphology subsystem of ANLI2ROBOT has
been built using a pattern-morphology approach, which
consists of root-patterns, and word inflections.
Copyright © 2014 Praise Worthy Prize S.r.l. - All rights reserved
1259
We believe that the morphology of a word is very
much responsible for applying certain meanings to the
morphed word. The morphology subsystem of
ANLI2ROBOT uses both the masking of the input word
and the searching knowledge approaches to process the
input Arabic words. As a result, each word used to
communicate with the robot will be analysed by (or
generated from) a morphology subsystem in conjunction
with the lexicon.
Multiple versions of a Prolog predicate, which
developed as morph (W1,W2, Sem) have been used to
build the morphology subsystem of ANLI2ROBOT,
where W1 is the input word,W2 is the root of the word,
and Sem is the semantic of the word (mostly the
primitive robotic commands corresponding to certain
Arabic verbs). An example of a root word, word patterns,
and the generated new word corresponding to each
pattern is shown in Table II.
TABLE II
DATABASE ARTEFACT AND POSSIBLE LEXICON WORDS
Root Word Suffix Infix Prefix Generated
Pattern Word
‫اﻓﻌﻞ‬ ‫أ‬ - - ‫اﻧﻘﻞ‬
‫ﻧﻘﻞ‬ ‫ﻓﺎﻋﻞ‬ - ‫ا‬ - ‫ﻧﺎﻗﻞ‬
‫ﻓﻌﻠﻲ‬ - - ‫ي‬ ‫ﻧﻘﻠﻲ‬
Using a limited number of words belonging to the
domain of moving metal objects helps in avoiding such
problems of inaccurate morphological analysis or using
the wrong synonyms when identifying the different
imperative sentence forms. To illustrate the problem,
consider the word ‘‫ ’اﻻن‬which means ‘now’, the problem
that could arise is that the last two characters ‘‫ ’ان‬could
be considered as a dual suffix in Arabic, while they are
original characters; trailing them generates a different
meaning and, as a result, will create the wrong root. This
example demonstrates the case where the generation of
the right primitive commands is wrong.
III.4. Syntax
Syntax is defined as the study of rules and principles
that manage sentence construction in certain languages.
Among a number of theoretical approaches that study
syntax, generative grammar sees language as a structure
of the human mind, known as i-language, and aims to
comprehensively model this internal language.
This approach was initiated by Noam Chomsky, who
presented transformational grammar (TG) in 1957, which
later led to the definition of government and binding
theory (GB) in the 1970s and 1980s that finally evolved
to minimalist program (MP) in 1995. Instead of the
communicative function of the sentence, generative
grammars mainly focus on the sentence form [1], [7], [8],
[9]. The Arabic natural language imperative sentence has
multiple forms. The most common is the one that starts
with the imperative verb. This form is used in this
research and is described using the notation of
transformational grammar as follows:
International Review on Computers and Software, Vol. 9, N. 7
 Ayad T. Imam, Thamer Al-Rousan, Ashraf Odeh
Imperative sentence  Imperative Verb + Noun
Imperative sentence  Imperative Verb + Phrase
Phrase  Adverbial Phrase | Prepositional Phrase
Adverbial Phrase  Adverb of place + Noun
Prepositional phrase  Preposition + Noun
Adverb of place  ‫ﺧﻠﻒ| اﻣﺎم |وراء | ﯾﺴﺎر | ﺑﻤﺒﻦ‬
Preposition  ‫ﻓﻲ|ﻋﻠﻰ|ﻋﻦ|اﻟﻰ|ﻣﻦ‬
Imperative Verb ‫ﺣﺮك | اﻧﻘﻞ | ﺿﻊ | اﺟﻠﺐ‬
Noun  ‫ﻗﻄﻌﺔ | ﺟﺴﻢ | ﺷﻲء | ذراع | رأس‬
This set of rules has been implemented as Prolog
predicates as follows, where m stands for ‘moving’, a
semantic of a verb, and p stands for ‘place’, another
semantic for a verb:
imp_sen([H|T]):- imp_verb(H), noun(T).
imp_sen([H|T]):- imp_verb(H), phrase(T).
phrase(S):-adverbal(S);preposition(S).
adverbal([H|T]):- adv_place(H),noun(T).
preposition([H|T]):- pre (H), noun(T).
noun([H|[]]):-morph(H,R,p), is_noun(R).
imp_verb (H):- morph(H,R,m), is_verb(R).
III.5. Semantics
In linguistics, semantics is defined as the study of the
meanings of words and phrases in a certain context of a
language. In computer science, semantic analysis is the
final stage of the analysis task of the compiler, aiming to
understand the program well enough to undertake the
following synthesis [14], [18], [19].
In ANLI2ROBOT, the semantic subsystem works in
conjunction with the morphology subsystem, based on
the principle that the morphology of a word is
responsible for giving certain meaning to the word. The
Arabic natural language imperative sentence issued by
the user is to be translated to primitive commands, as
previously listed in Table I, depending on the semantic of
the verb given in the sentence, The meanings of other
words are used to check the semantic basis of the
sentence. The predicate used for identifying the semantic
of the issued imperative sentence is semantic (X,Y),
where the input variable, W, is the Arabic verb extracted
from the sentence, and the output Y is the primitive
command of the lifting arm robot. This predicate invokes
the morph (W1,W2, Sem) predicate as follows:
semantic (X,Y) :-morph (X,_,Y).
IV. Results
Since ANLI2ROBOT is related to a robotic real-time
application, time consumption and accuracy (the total
number of correctly executed imperative sentences
issued to the robot) are considered to be performance
indicators.
During the experiment, common imperative sentence
forms were provided. While issuing various natural
language imperative sentences to ANLI2ROBOT, test
users were unsure of the robot’s linguistic knowledge
since it is viewed as a machine. Hence, the sentences
Copyright © 2014 Praise Worthy Prize S.r.l. - All rights reserved
1260
used were simple, direct, and restricted to short-
contained words. Examples of commonly used little
complexity imperative sentences are ‘‫ ’ارﻓﻊ اﻟﻘﻄﻌﺔ‬and ‘ ‫اﻧﻘﻞ‬
‫’اﻟﻘﻄﻌﺔ‬, which mean Move Up and Move Forward,
respectively. This is not all; the computer handling of
natural language differs in detail from the handling of
artificial language; synonyms for example. For each
word we recorded some possible synonyms. So, we
applied a certain degree of complexity to the issued
sentences. The degrees of complexity of the imperative
sentence forms used to test ANLI2ROBOT were of little
complex.
The degree of complexity encompasses the number of
words used in the sentence, synonyms, and the
morphological form criteria used to form the imperative
sentence. An example of a complex sentence is ‘ ‫اﻧﻘﻞ‬
‫ﻗﻄﻌﺘﯿﻦ اﺛﻨﺘﯿﻦ ﻋﻠﻰ ﻣﺮﺗﯿﻦ‬, which means ‘move two objects in
two stages’. The complex forms of the imperative
sentence were necessary to check the accuracy of the
translation of the issued imperative sentences to the
primitive commands. Regarding the complexity of the
imperative sentence, we noted that, as the positions of the
objects (certain places of the robot’s work area which are
the start and end positions) are a priori known to the
robot, these locations become the landmarks for
positioning the robot’s gripper. Actually, this criterion
positively affected the use of the robot in that there was
no need to explicitly position the robot’s gripper to pick
up the metal object or explicitly determine the target
location to move the objects; this led to using simple
forms of the imperative sentence more than complex
ones. The relationship between complexity and response
time is shown in Fig. 4.
Fig. 4. Accuracy vs. Complexity of Imperative Sentence
Another important result from ANLI2ROBOT is the
effect of the imperative sentence’s complexity on the
execution time. This is particularly relevant to the
programming language used to develop ANLI2ROBOT.
When more than four words are used to construct an
imperative sentence, as translating the Arabic imperative
sentence to the robot’s primitive commands means
tokenizing, morphing, syntactically parsing the sentence,
and semantically translating the sentence, the time spent
on these activities notably increased, as shown in Fig. 5.
Overall, Fig. 4 and Fig. 5 suggest that increasing the
complexity of the imperative sentence leads to increasing
the response time and failed cases (inaccuracy).
International Review on Computers and Software, Vol. 9, N. 7
 Ayad T. Imam, Thamer Al-Rousan, Ashraf Odeh
Fig. 5. Time vs. Complexity of Imperative Sentence
V. Discussion and Future Work
This paper presented an Arabic natural language robot
interface that understands Arabic natural language
imperative sentences of a specific domain and translates
them into primitive robot commands. This is achieved by
utilizing the architecture of natural language systems and
their techniques.
The developed interface gives the user the ability to
ask the robot to grasp small pallets and move them from
one place to another. A number of significant results
were revealed during the course of the work. Lexicon,
morphological, syntactical, and semantic Arabic
language subsystems are all used in the ALI2ROBOT.
The system shows fair success in understanding and
executing imperative sentences by addressing and
handling the different semantic interpretations of a word
by using the domain strategy and accepting different
syntactic forms of a word by defining its morphological
production rules.
This is a noteworthy result as one of the key issues of
HRI is the parsing of the user’s communication into
commands understood by the robot.
Furthermore, it has also shown that the user’s
background has some effect in the interaction with the
robot.
However, this background does not impact the user’s
ability to command the robot to move metal objects.
As future work, we recommend enhancing this
interface by embedding a speech recognition subsystem.
Also, adding a learning component to the interface
will give the robot the ability to learn from interaction
sessions how to recognize new word forms and new
sentence forms, which will lead to the development of
user-adaptive robots.
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International Review on Computers and Software, Vol. 9, N. 7
 Ayad T. Imam, Thamer Al-Rousan, Ashraf Odeh

Authors’ information
1
Dept. of SE, Faculty of IT, Al-Isra University, Jordan.
2
Dept. of CIS, Faculty of IT, Al-Isra University, Jordan.

Ayad T. Imam, Assistant Prof. at Al-Isra

University / Amman / Jordan, received his
Ph.D degree in computer science from De
Montfort University, UK. He has number of
published papers in various computer science
and Software Engineering topics. Dr. Ayad is
an active member of ACM. Also, he is a
reviewer in a number of journals and
conferences of computer, software, and information technology
related areas.

Thamer Sami Al-Rousan got his Ph.D in

software engineering from University Sains
Malaysia (USM) – Malaysia. Cureently he
works as an assistant prof. in al_isra University.
He published number of papers in different
aspects of SE and related topics.

Ashraf A. Odeh got his Ph.D in Computer

Information Systems from Amman Arab
University - Jordan. Cureently he works as an
assistant prof. in al_isra University. He has
number of published papers in different
aspects of IT topics.

Copyright © 2014 Praise Worthy Prize S.r.l. - All rights reserved International Review on Computers and Software, Vol. 9, N. 7

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