Emergent verbal behaviour in human-robot interaction

The paper describes emergent verbal behaviour that arises when speech components are added to a robotics simulator. In the existing simulator the robot performs its activities silently. When speech synthesis is added, the first level of emergent verbal behaviour is that the robot produces spoken monologues giving a stream of simple explanations of its movements. When speech recognition is added, human-robot interaction can be initiated by the human, using voice commands to direct the robot's movements. In addition, cooperative verbal behaviour emerges when the robot modifies its own verbal behaviour in response to being asked by the human to talk less or more. The robotics framework supports different behavioural paradigms, including finite state machines, reinforcement learning and fuzzy decisions. By combining finite state machines with the speech interface, spoken dialogue systems based on state transitions can be implemented. These dialogue systems exemplify emergent verbal behaviour that is robot-initiated: the robot asks appropriate questions in order to achieve the dialogue goal. The paper mentions current work on using Wikipedia as a knowledge base for open-domain dialogues, and suggests promising ideas for topic-tracking and robot-initiated conversational topics.