Abstract
We present a dialogue system for a conversational robot, Erica. Our goal is for Erica to engage in more human-like conversation, rather than being a simple question-answering robot. Our dialogue manager integrates question-answering with a statement response component which generates dialogue by asking about focused words detected in the user’s utterance, and a proactive initiator which generates dialogue based on events detected by Erica. We evaluate the statement response component and find that it produces coherent responses to a majority of user utterances taken from a human-machine dialogue corpus. An initial study with real users also shows that it reduces the number of fallback utterances by half. Our system is beneficial for producing mixed-initiative conversation.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
In Japanese, there are no articles such as ‘a’ or ‘the’.
- 2.
- 3.
“So desu ka”: “I see”, “Tashikani”: “Sure”.
- 4.
References
Banchs R, Li H (2012) IRIS: a chat-oriented dialogue system based on the vector space model. In: Annual meeting of the association for computational linguistics, July, pp 37–42
Bartneck C, Kulić D, Croft E, Zoghbi S (2009) Measurement instruments for the anthropomorphism, animacy, likeability, perceived intelligence, and perceived safety of robots. Int J Soc Robot 1(1):71–81
Becker-Asano C, Ogawa K, Nishio S, Ishiguro H (2010) Exploring the uncanny valley with Geminoid HI-1 in a real-world application. In: Proceedings of IADIS international conference interfaces and human computer interaction, pp 121–128
Bevacqua E, Cowie R, Eyben F, Gunes H, Heylen D, Maat M, Mckeown G, Pammi S, Pantic M, Pelachaud C, De Sevin E, Valstar M, Wollmer M, Shroder M, Schuller B (2012) Building autonomous sensitive artificial listeners. IEEE Trans Affect Comput 3(2):165–183
Bohus D, Horvitz E (2014) Managing human-robot engagement with forecasts and... um... hesitations. In: International conference on multimodal interaction, pp 2–9
Bohus D, Kamar E, Horvitz E (2012) Towards situated collaboration. In: NAACL-HLT workshop on future directions and needs in the spoken dialog community: tools and data, pp 13–14
Den Y, Yoshida N, Takanashi K, Koiso H (2011) Annotation of Japanese response tokens and preliminary analysis on their distribution in three-party conversations. In: 2011 international conference on speech database and assessments (COCOSDA). IEEE, pp 168–173
DeVault D, Artstein R, Benn G, Dey T, Fast E, Gainer A, Georgila K, Gratch J, Hartholt A, Lhommet M, Lucas G, Marsella S, Morbini F, Nazarian A, Scherer S, Stratou G, Suri A, Traum D, Wood R, Xu Y, Rizzo A, Morency Lp (2014) SimSensei kiosk: a virtual human interviewer for healthcare decision support. In: International conference on autonomous agents and multi-agent systems, vol 1, pp 1061–1068
Ha EY, Mitchell CM, Boyer KE, Lester JC (2013) Learning dialogue management models for task-oriented dialogue with parallel dialogue and task streams. In: SIGdial meeting on discourse and dialogue, August, pp 204–213
Higashinaka R, Isozaki H (2008) Corpus-based question answering for why-questions. In: International joint conference on natural language processing, pp 418–425
Higashinaka R, Nakano M, Aikawa K (2003) Corpus-based discourse understanding in spoken dialogue systems. In: Annual meeting on association for computational linguistics, vol 1, pp 240–247. https://doi.org/10.3115/1075096.1075127
Higashinaka R, Prasad R, Walker MA (2006a) Learning to generate naturalistic utterances using reviews in spoken dialogue systems. In: International conference on computational linguistics, July, pp 265–272. https://doi.org/10.3115/1220175.1220209
Higashinaka R, Sudoh K, Nakano M (2006b) Incorporating discourse features into confidence scoring of intention recognition results in spoken dialogue systems. Speech Commun 48(3–4):417–436. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.specom.2005.06.011
Higashinaka R, Imamura K, Meguro T, Miyazaki C, Kobayashi N, Sugiyama H, Hirano T, Makino T, Matsuo Y (2014) Towards an open-domain conversational system fully based on natural language processing. In: International conference on computational linguistics, pp 928–939. http://www.aclweb.org/anthology/C14-1088
Leuski A, Traum D (2011) NPCEditor: creating virtual human dialogue using information retrieval techniques. AI Mag 32(2):42–56
Misu T, Raux A, Lane I, Devassy J, Gupta R (2013) Situated multi-modal dialog system in vehicles. In: Proceedings of the 6th workshop on eye gaze in intelligent human machine interaction: gaze in multimodal interaction, pp 7–9
Ogawa K, Nishio S, Koda K, Balistreri G, Watanabe T, Ishiguro H (2011) Exploring the natural reaction of young and aged person with telenoid in a real world. JACIII 15(5):592–597
Pejsa T, Bohus D, Cohen MF, Saw CW, Mahoney J, Horvitz E (2014) Natural communication about uncertainties in situated interaction. In: International conference on multimodal interaction, pp 283–290. https://doi.org/10.1145/2663204.2663249
Shitaoka K, Tokuhisa R, Yoshimura T, Hoshino H, Watanabe N (2010) Active listening system for dialogue robot. In: JSAI SIG-SLUD Technical Report, vol 58, pp 61–66 (in Japanese)
Skantze G, Hjalmarsson A, Oertel C (2014) Turn-taking, feedback and joint attention in situated human-robot interaction. Speech Commun 65:50–66
Su PH, Gašić M, Mrksic N, Rojas-Barahona L, Ultes S, Vandyke D, Wen TH, Young S (2016) On-line reward learning for policy optimisation in spoken dialogue systems. In: ACL
Traum D, Swartout W, Gratch J, Marsella S (2008) A virtual human dialogue model for non-team interaction. In: Recent trends in discourse and dialogue. Springer, pp 45–67
Traum D, Aggarwal P, Artstein R, Foutz S, Gerten J, Katsamanis A, Leuski A, Noren D, Swartout W (2012) Ada and grace: direct interaction with museum visitors. In: Intelligent virtual agents. Springer, pp 245–251
Varges S, Quarteroni S, Riccardi G, Ivanov AV (2010) Investigating clarification strategies in a hybrid POMDP dialog manager. In: Proceedings of the 11th annual meeting of the special interest group on discourse and dialogue, pp 213–216
Yoshino K, Kawahara T (2015) Conversational system for information navigation based on pomdp with user focus tracking. Comput Speech Lang 34(1):275–291
Yumak Z, Ren J, Thalmann NM, Yuan J (2014) Modelling multi-party interactions among virtual characters, robots, and humans. Presence Teleoperators Virtual Environ 23(2):172–190
Acknowledgements
This work was supported by JST ERATO Ishiguro Symbiotic Human-Robot Interaction program (Grant Number JPMJER1401), Japan.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2019 Springer International Publishing AG, part of Springer Nature
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Milhorat, P. et al. (2019). A Conversational Dialogue Manager for the Humanoid Robot ERICA. In: Eskenazi, M., Devillers, L., Mariani, J. (eds) Advanced Social Interaction with Agents . Lecture Notes in Electrical Engineering, vol 510. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-92108-2_14
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-92108-2_14
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-92107-5
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-92108-2
eBook Packages: EngineeringEngineering (R0)