Human interaction with shopping assistant robot in natural language

In spite of having been investigated for over fifty years, developing a robust spoken dialog management system remains an open research issue in robotics and natural language processing. In this paper, we present a language-independent spoken dialog management module integrated into a human-robot interaction system. We adopt an algorithmic approach to dialog modeling. A mobile robot functioning as a shopping assistant exemplifies the proposed approach. The dialog module is composed of a state transition network, in which state switches are conditioned by both visual and communicative factors. We use the formalism of a finite state automaton, where the robot changes its state by performing a speech act or a non-verbal action from the set of specified act/action types.