No description available.

Generating computer animation from natural language instructions is a complex task that encompasses several key aspects of artificial intelligence including natural language understanding, computer graphics and knowledge representation. Traditionally, this task has been approached using rule based systems which were highly successful on their respective domains, but were difficult to generalise to other domains. In this thesis, I describe the key theories and principles behind a domain-independent machine learning framework for constructing natural language based animation systems, and show how this framework can be more flexible and more powerful than the prevalent rule based approach. / I begin this thesis with a thorough introduction to the goals of the research. I then review the most relevant literature to put this research into perspective. After the literature review, I provide brief descriptions to the most relevant technologies in both natural language processing and computer graphics. I then report original research in semantic role labelling and verb sense disambiguation, followed by a detailed description and analysis of the machine learning framework for natural language based animation generation. / The key contributions of this thesis are: a novel method for performing semantic role labelling of prepositional phrases, a novel method for performing verb sense disambiguation, and a novel machine learning framework for grounding linguistic information in virtual worlds and converting verb-semantic information to computer graphics commands to create computer animation.