Adapting a Robot's linguistic style based on socially-aware reinforcement learning

Hannes Ritschel, Tobias Baur, Elisabeth Andre
2017 2017 26th IEEE International Symposium on Robot and Human Interactive Communication (RO-MAN)  
When looking at Socially Interactive Robots, adaptation to the user's preferences plays an important role in today's Human-Robot Interaction to keep interaction interesting and engaging over a long period of time. Findings indicate an increase in user engagement for robots with adaptive behavior and personality, but also that it depends on the task context whether a similar or opposing robot personality is preferred. We present an approach based on Reinforcement Learning, which gets its reward
more » ... irectly from social signals in real-time during the interaction, to quickly learn about and dynamically address individual human preferences. Our scenario involves a Reeti robot in the role of a story teller talking about the main characters in the novel "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland" by generating descriptions with varying degree of introversion/extraversion. After initial simulation results, an interactive prototype is presented which allows to explore the learning process adapting to the human interaction partner's engagement. Paper accepted for 2017 26th IEEE International Symposium on Robot and Human Interactive Communication (RO-MAN). Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works.
doi:10.1109/roman.2017.8172330 dblp:conf/ro-man/RitschelBA17 fatcat:ceotslxmtjfavfcatal7dzdlae