A Visually-Aware Conversational Robot Receptionist

Nancie Gunson, Daniel Hernandez Garcia, Weronika Sieińska, Angus Addlesee, Christian Dondrup, Oliver Lemon, Jose L. Part, Yanchao Yu

Abstract
Socially Assistive Robots (SARs) have the potential to play an increasingly important role in a variety of contexts including healthcare, but most existing systems have very limited interactive capabilities. We will demonstrate a robot receptionist that not only supports task-based and social dialogue via natural spoken conversation but is also capable of visually grounded dialogue; able to perceive and discuss the shared physical environment (e.g. helping users to locate personal belongings or objects of interest). Task-based dialogues include check-in, navigation and FAQs about facilities, alongside social features such as chit-chat, access to the latest news and a quiz game to play while waiting. We also show how visual context (objects and their spatial relations) can be combined with linguistic representations of dialogue context, to support visual dialogue and question answering. We will demonstrate the system on a humanoid ARI robot, which is being deployed in a hospital reception area.
Anthology ID:
2022.sigdial-1.61
Volume:
Proceedings of the 23rd Annual Meeting of the Special Interest Group on Discourse and Dialogue
Month:
September
Year:
2022
Address:
Edinburgh, UK
Editors:
Oliver Lemon, Dilek Hakkani-Tur, Junyi Jessy Li, Arash Ashrafzadeh, Daniel Hernández Garcia, Malihe Alikhani, David Vandyke, Ondřej Dušek
Venue:
SIGDIAL
SIG:
SIGDIAL
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
645–648
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.sigdial-1.61
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2022.sigdial-1.61
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Nancie Gunson, Daniel Hernandez Garcia, Weronika Sieińska, Angus Addlesee, Christian Dondrup, Oliver Lemon, Jose L. Part, and Yanchao Yu. 2022. A Visually-Aware Conversational Robot Receptionist. In Proceedings of the 23rd Annual Meeting of the Special Interest Group on Discourse and Dialogue, pages 645–648, Edinburgh, UK. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
A Visually-Aware Conversational Robot Receptionist (Gunson et al., SIGDIAL 2022)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/nschneid-patch-3/2022.sigdial-1.61.pdf
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