Moratz, Reinhard & Thora Tenbrink. 2003. Instruction modes for joint spatial reference between naive users and a mobile robot. Special Session "New Methods in Human-Robot Interaction" at RISSP IEEE International Conference on Robotics, Intelligent Systems and Signal Processing. October 8-13, 2003, Changsha, Hunan, China.

Abstract:

This paper reports about an experiment addressing different modes
of natural language instructions in spatial human-robot
interaction. The experimental setting involves a mobile robot
equipped with an elementary dialogue system and human users unfamiliar with it who are
required to achieve joint spatial reference with the robot either
in spoken or in written mode. In addition, the robot's output is
varied between an initial scene description (indicating the
robot's conceptual and linguistic knowledge), and no initial
output. Our robot uses a computational model of spatial reference to interpret the
linguistic instructions that is based on psycholinguistic evidence
and on previous experiments. Results show that the model is successful
with regard to the correct interpretation of the intended
kinds of instructions, that scene descriptions
can encourage users to refer directly to the goal object, and that
there are lasting negative effects on communication if potentially
successful spoken instructions are not recognized by the speech component.