TaskMaster: A Novel Cross-platform Task-based Spoken Dialogue System for Human-Robot Interaction

Strathearn, Carl; Yu, Yanchao; Gkatzia, Dimitra

Abstract

The most effective way of communication between humans and robots is through natural language communication. However, there are many challenges to overcome before robots can effectively converse in order to collaborate and work together with humans. This paper introduces TaskMaster 1 a novel cross-platform spoken dialogue system (SDS) for human-robot interaction (HRI) which employs a neural language model to generate responses in the context of task-based situations. In contrast to previous works that have employed templates and canned text for dialogue in HRI, we show that the dialogue output of TaskMaster is more flexible than a template-based variation. In a series of task-orientated case studies and a video demonstration2, we show that in real-world settings TaskMaster can generate more relevant responses to questions, identify missing objects and offer alternatives, confirm and clarify aspects of a task, and adapt to unpredictable situations more effectively than traditional template approaches used in HRI

Citation

Strathearn, C., Yu, Y., & Gkatzia, D. (2023). TaskMaster: A Novel Cross-platform Task-based Spoken Dialogue System for Human-Robot Interaction. In Proceedings of The Joint CUI and HRI Workshop at HRI 2023

• Conference Name: 'HRCI23
• Conference Location: Stockholm, Sweden
• Start Date: Mar 13, 2023
• Publication Date: 2023
• Deposit Date: Jun 29, 2023
• Publicly Available Date: Jun 29, 2023
• Publisher: Association for Computing Machinery (ACM)
• Book Title: Proceedings of The Joint CUI and HRI Workshop at HRI 2023
• Keywords: Spoken language interaction, Task-based dialogue, Human-robot interaction, Natural language generation
• Publisher URL: https://cui.acm.org/workshops/HRI2023/pdfs/HRCI23_paper_5.pdf