Collaborative Research: Conference: Dialogue and Robots

The Dialogue and Robots workshop addresses the issues of spoken language processing for human-robot interaction since communication between robots and humans presents multiple novel challenges. To address these challenges the team will bring together roboticists, spoken dialogue systems researchers, human-robot interaction researchers, computer scientists, speech scientists and technologists and natural language processing researchers to understand how to use various knowledge sources so that robots can more naturally and effectively interact with people. Success in this area will help a broad application of social robots to the benefit of society, including working with and alongside people in homes, schools, hospitals, and workplaces. The expected result of Dialogue and Robots workshop is the stimulation of interdisciplinary collaborations that focus on solving problems in speech communication that currently limit the effectiveness of social robots in various situations. The workshop participants' discussions cover a range of problems, from the basics of the platforms to technical challenges in robotics, human-robot interaction, spoken dialogue systems, and natural language processing. Topics include processing multimodal data, situated reasoning, achieving common ground in human-AI collaboration, building trust in collaborative systems, and applications of such systems for social good. The workshop will result in whitepapers that define concrete research projects. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.