First time encounters with Roberta : a humanoid assistant for conversational autobiography creation

During eNTERFACE we developed a dialog system
design and conversation material for Roberta, an anthropomorphic
assistant robot. The focus was on the first stage of what we
call LifeLine dialogs, i.e. the conversational creation of users’
life stories. Our goal is to help senior citizens record semiautobiographical
narratives while combating the deterioration
of memory and speech abilities. We successfully completed
modelling dialog scenarios for first time users. This allows Roberta
to personalize future conversations based on each user’s place
of origin, work and education history, and hobbies, which are
all information gathered during a user’s first conversation with
Roberta. We accomplished this through (1) an adaptable dialog
system with topic management and multi-modal functionalities
(specifically face recognition), by extending a RavenClaw-type
dialog management framework, (2) using the Wizard of Oz
(WOZ) data collection technique for categorizing introductory
conversation material and identifying semantic rules and concepts,
and (3) simulating the customization of a user’s relationship
with Roberta by introducing wizard-controlled contextual data,
conversation history, and emotion awareness.