The Robotics Institute

Carnegie Mellon Robotics Institute

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Abstract

Hala is a bilingual (Arabic and English) culturally-sensitive robot receptionist located at Carnegie Mellon University in Qatar. We report results from Hala's deployment by comparing her English dialogue corpus to that of a similar monolingual robot (named "Tank") located at CMU's Pittsburgh campus. Specifically, we compare the average number of turns per interaction, duration of interactions, frequency of interactions with personal questions, rate of non-understandings, and rate of thanks after the robot's answer. We provide possible explanations for observed similarities and differences and highlight potential cultural implications on the interactions.

Keywords

human-robot interaction, natural language dialogue, social robots, conversational agents, culture

Notes

Associated Center(s) / Consortia: Vision and Autonomous Systems Center and Quality of Life Technology Center

Associated Lab(s) / Group(s): Reliable Autonomous Systems Lab and Human-Robot Interaction Group

Associated Project(s): Roboceptionist

Text Reference

Maxim Makatchev, Imran Aslam Fanaswala, Ameer Ayman Abdulsalam, Brett Browning, Wael Mahmoud Ghazzawi, Majd Sakr, and Reid Simmons, "Dialogue Patterns of an Arabic Robot Receptionist," Proceeding of the 5th ACM/IEEE international conference on Human-robot interaction, March, 2010.

BibTeX Reference

@inproceedings{Makatchev_2010_6566,
   author = "Maxim Makatchev and Imran Aslam Fanaswala and Ameer Ayman Abdulsalam and Brett Browning and Wael Mahmoud Ghazzawi and Majd Sakr and Reid Simmons",
   title = "Dialogue Patterns of an Arabic Robot Receptionist",
   booktitle = "Proceeding of the 5th ACM/IEEE international conference on Human-robot interaction",
   publisher = "ACM/IEEE",
   month = "March",
   year = "2010",
   Notes = "Copyright ACM, IEEE, 2010."
}

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