Evaluating description and reference strategies in a cooperative human-robot dialogue system

Abstract

We present a human-robot dialogue system that en-ables a robot to work together with a human user to build wooden construction toys. We then describe a study which assessed the responses of naı̈ve users to output that varied along two dimensions: the method of describing an assembly plan (pre-order or post-order), and the method of referring to ob-jects in the world (basic and full). Varying both of these factors produced significant results: sub-jects using the system that employed a pre-order description strategy asked for instructions to be re-peated significantly less often than those who expe-rienced the post-order strategy, while the subjects who heard references generated by the full refer-ence strategy judged the robot’s instructions to be significantly more understandable than did those who heard the output of the basic strategy. 1