Is Silence Golden in Human-Robot Dialogue?

The physical actions performed by any robot can be used to convey meaning to a user in human-robot interaction. While the analysis of physical actions as communicative acts is not new, it is less clear how dialogue planning policies for human-robot interaction should be influenced by the co-occurrence of physical tasks actions. In this short paper we report on a study which analyses the relative importance of omitting verbal feedback in situated human-robot dialogue. Results indicate that while a lack of explicit feedback can and does lead to more errors in dialogue, overall task performance times are improved, while users perceive the resultant system as better performing on a number of subjective measures.