Improving Dialogue Continuity using Inter-Robot Interaction

Research on conversational dialogue systems has attracted attention for achieving dialogue systems that can build social relationships with users. Although such systems are required for continuing long conversations with users to build relationships, they sometimes make sentences that are not related to the dialogue context, causing the dialogue to easily break down. The cause of the difficulty is simple. Unlike task-oriented dialogues, unexpected user utterances whose meaning the system cannot capture are frequently spoken in conversational dialogues, since the dialogue domain is much less restricted and the dialogue goal is less obvious. In this paper, we propose a novel strategy for dialogue systems through which two robots coordinate to create long conversations by avoiding dialogue breakdowns. If one of the two robots accepts user utterances with backchannel, the responsibility of responding to the user utterances is resolved and the other robot can change the dialogue topic, which decreases the risk of generating discontinuous utterances. Even if a dialogue nearly breaks down, such multiple robots can present predefined natural interactions among themselves to repair it. Our experiments show that the inter-robot interaction effectively improves the establishment of conversational dialogue that helps users continue the dialogue.

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