The Robotics Institute

Carnegie Mellon Robotics Institute

Copyright notice: This material is presented to ensure timely dissemination of scholarly and technical work. Copyright and all rights therein are retained by authors or by other copyright holders. All persons copying this information are expected to adhere to the terms and constraints invoked by each author's copyright. These works may not be reposted without the explicit permission of the copyright holder.

Abstract

Not all questions are asked with the same intention. Humans tend to address the implicit meaning of the question (that contributes to its \textit{pragmatic force}), which requires knowledge of the context and a degree of common ground, more so than addressing the explicit propositional content of the question. Is recognizing the pragmatic force in today's human-robot dialogue systems worth the trouble? We focus on display questions (questions to which the asker already knows the answer) and argue that there are realistic human-robot interaction scenarios in existence today that would benefit from the deeper intention recognition. We also propose a method for obtaining display question annotations by embedding an elicitation question into the dialogue. The preliminary study of our robot receptionist shows that at least 16.7% of interactions with the embedded elicitation question include a display question.

Keywords

display questions, pragmatics, human-robot dialogue

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 and Reid Simmons, "Do You Really Want to Know? Display Questions in Human-Robot Dialogues," Proc. of AAAI Fall Symposium on Dialog with Robots, November, 2010.

BibTeX Reference

@inproceedings{Makatchev_2010_6708,
   author = "Maxim Makatchev and Reid Simmons",
   title = "Do You Really Want to Know? Display Questions in Human-Robot Dialogues",
   booktitle = "Proc. of AAAI Fall Symposium on Dialog with Robots",
   publisher = "AAAI Press",
   month = "November",
   year = "2010",
}

The Robotics Institute

Menu