Facebook researchers propose an AI assistant for Minecraft

If you’ve ever wished Minecraft had an Alexa-like assistant that could perform any task asked of it, you’re in luck. Facebook researchers recently argued for an interactive, collaborative Minecraft bot for natural language understanding (NLU) research. They posit that the constraints of Minecraft make it well-suited to experiments in various NLU subfields, and to this end, they’ve made baseline data, code, labeling tools, and infrastructure freely available on GitHub.

Their work to an extent builds on LIGHT, an open source research environment in the form of a large-scale, crowdsourced text adventure within which AI systems and humans interact as player characters. Scientists at Facebook AI Research, the Lorraine Research Laboratory in Computer Science and its Applications, and the University College London detailed LIGHT in paper published earlier this year.