Abstract
The chapter discusses some approaches to increasing the naturalness and flexibility of human-robot interaction, with examples from the WikiTalk dialogue system. WikiTalk enables robots to talk fluently about thousands of topics using Wikipedia-based talking. However, there are three challenging areas that need to be addressed to make the system more natural: speech interaction, face recognition, interaction history. We address these challenges and describe more context-aware approaches taking the individual partner into account when generating responses. Finally, we discuss the need for a Wikipedia-based listening capability to enable robots to follow the changing topics in human conversation. This would allow robots to join in the conversation using Wikipedia-based talking to make new topically relevant dialogue contributions.
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Acknowledgements
The first author thanks Prof. Tatsuya Kawahara of Kyoto University for the opportunity to participate in the ERICA robot project. The second author acknowledges the support of the New Energy and Industrial Technology Development Organisation (NEDO) in Japan.
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Wilcock, G., Jokinen, K. (2021). Towards Increasing Naturalness and Flexibility in Human-Robot Dialogue Systems. In: Marchi, E., Siniscalchi, S.M., Cumani, S., Salerno, V.M., Li, H. (eds) Increasing Naturalness and Flexibility in Spoken Dialogue Interaction. Lecture Notes in Electrical Engineering, vol 714. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-9323-9_9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-9323-9_9
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