Cognitive and emotional linguistic interaction

The MAPH project is an extension of the French therapeu- tic and robotics Emotirob project. Since Emotirob aims at conceiving and realizing a “reactive” companion robot, which can emotionnally interact with young weakened chil- dren, MAPH aims at implementing linguistic interaction be- tween the soft toy robot and the child. The first step of this work aims at modelling the pragmatic and emotional world of a young child. From a set of 1500 words and the aid of questionnaires in a school, a taxonomy and a set of proper- ties have been built which have made it possible to define a distance between two words and concepts of a higher level. Currently, our system is able to generate very simple sen- tences in the context of elementary linguistic games. As a perspective, we envisage making the robot able to enrich its vocabulary, and able to define a set of linguistic reaction patterns in accordance to a child's emotional state.