This book explores novel aspects of social robotics, spoken dialogue systems, human-robot interaction, spoken language understanding, multimodal communication, and system evaluation. It offers a variety of perspectives on and solutions to the most important questions about advanced techniques for social robots and chat systems. Chapters by leading researchers address key research and development topics in the field of spoken dialogue systems, focusing in particular on three special themes: dialogue state tracking, evaluation of human-robot dialogue in social robotics, and socio-cognitive language processing. The book offers a valuable resource for researchers and practitioners in both academia and industry whose work involves advanced interaction technology and who are seeking an up-to-date overview of the key topics. It also provides supplementary educational material for courses on state-of-the-art dialogue system technologies, social robotics, and related research fields.

Recent years have witnessed a surge of interest for service robots endowed with communicative abilities. Such robots could take care of routine tasks, in homes, offices, schools or hospitals, help disabled or mentally impaired persons, serve as social companions for the elderly, or simply entertain us. They would assist us in our daily life activities. These robots are, by definition, meant to be deployed in social environments, and their capacity to interact naturally with humans is thus a crucial factor. The development of such "talking robots" led to the emergence of a new research field, Human-Robot Interaction (HRI), which draws from a wide range of scientific disciplines such as artificial intelligence, robotics, linguistics and cognitive science. This work focuses on the issue of robust speech understanding - that is, how to process spoken dialogue automatically to extract the intended meaning. The book presents a new approach which combines linguistic resources with statistical techniques and context-sensitive interpretation to achieve both deep and robust spoken dialogue comprehension. The first part of the book provides a general introduction to the field of human-robot interaction and details the major linguistic properties of spoken dialogue, as well as some grammatical formalisms used to analyse them. The second part describes the approach itself, devoting one chapter to context-sensitive speech recognition for HRI, and one chapter to the robust parsing of spoken inputs via grammar relaxation and statistical parse selection. All the algorithms presented are fully implemented, and integrated as part of a distributed cognitive architecture for autonomous robots. A complete evaluation of our approach using Wizard-of-Oz experiments is also provided in this book. The results demonstrate very significant improvements in accuracy and robustness compared to the baseline.

Robots That Talk and Listen provides a forward-looking examination of speech and language in robots from technical, functional, and social perspectives. Contributors address cultural foundations as well as the linguistic skills and technologies that robots need to function effectively in real-world settings. Among the most difficult and complex is the ability to understand and use language. Speech-enabled automata are already serving as interactive toys, teacher’s aides, and research assistants. These robots will soon be joined by personal companions, industrial co-workers, and military support automata. The social impact of these and other robots extends well beyond the specific tasks they perform. Contributors tackle the most knotty of those issues, notably acceptance of advanced, speech-enabled robots and developing ethical and moral controls for robots. Topics in this book include: • Language and Beyond: The True Meaning of “Speech Enabled” • Robots in Myth and Media • Enabling Robots to Converse • Language Learning by Automata • Handling Noisy Settings • Empirical Studies of Robots in Real-World Environments • Acceptance of Intelligent Robots • Managing Robots that Can Lie and Deceive • Envisioning a World Shared with Intelligent Robots

These proceedings presents the state-of-the-art in spoken dialog systems with applications in robotics, knowledge access and communication. It addresses specifically: 1. Dialog for interacting with smartphones; 2. Dialog for Open Domain knowledge access; 3. Dialog for robot interaction; 4. Mediated dialog (including crosslingual dialog involving Speech Translation); and,5. Dialog quality evaluation. These articles were presented at the IWSDS 2012 workshop.

This book compiles and presents a synopsis on current global research efforts to push forward the state of the art in dialogue technologies, including advances to the classical problems of dialogue management, language generation, question answering, human–robot interaction, chatbots design and evaluation, as well as topics related to the human nature of the conversational phenomena such as humour, social context, specific applications for e-health, understanding, and awareness

This book presents lectures given at the 8th International Workshop on Spoken Dialog Systems. As agents evolve in terms of their ability to carry on a dialog with users, several qualities are emerging as essential components of a successful system. Users do not carry on long conversations on only one topic—they tend to switch between several topics. Thus the authors are observing the emergence of multi-domain systems that enable users to seamlessly hop from one domain to another. The systems have become active social partners. Accordingly, work on social dialog has become crucial to active and engaging human–robot/agent interaction. These new systems call for a coherent framework that guides their actions as chatbots and conversational agents. Human–Robot/Agent assessment mechanisms naturally lend themselves to this task. As these systems increasingly assist humans in a multitude of tasks, the ethics of their existence, their design and their interaction with users are becoming crucial issues. This book discusses the essential players and features involved, such as chat-based agents, multi-domain dialog systems, human–robot interaction, social dialog policy, and advanced dialog system architectures.

This book provides a comprehensive introduction to Conversational AI. While the idea of interacting with a computer using voice or text goes back a long way, it is only in recent years that this idea has become a reality with the emergence of digital personal assistants, smart speakers, and chatbots. Advances in AI, particularly in deep learning, along with the availability of massive computing power and vast amounts of data, have led to a new generation of dialogue systems and conversational interfaces. Current research in Conversational AI focuses mainly on the application of machine learning and statistical data-driven approaches to the development of dialogue systems. However, it is important to be aware of previous achievements in dialogue technology and to consider to what extent they might be relevant to current research and development. Three main approaches to the development of dialogue systems are reviewed: rule-based systems that are handcrafted using best practice guidelines; statistical data-driven systems based on machine learning; and neural dialogue systems based on end-to-end learning. Evaluating the performance and usability of dialogue systems has become an important topic in its own right, and a variety of evaluation metrics and frameworks are described. Finally, a number of challenges for future research are considered, including: multimodality in dialogue systems, visual dialogue; data efficient dialogue model learning; using knowledge graphs; discourse and dialogue phenomena; hybrid approaches to dialogue systems development; dialogue with social robots and in the Internet of Things; and social and ethical issues.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Social Robotics, ICSR 2016, held in Kansas City, MO, USA, in November 2016. The 98 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 107 submissions. The theme of the 2016 conference is Sociorobotics: Design and implementation of social behaviors of robots interacting with each other and humans. In addition to technical sessions, ICSR 2016 included three workshops: The Synthetic Method in Social Robotics (SMSR 2016), Social Robots: A Tool to Advance Interventions for Autism, and Using Social Robots to Improve the Quality of Life in the Elderly.