The Pragmatic Social Robot: Toward Socially-Sensitive Utterance Generation in Human-Robot Interactions

One of the hallmarks of humans as social agents is the ability to adjust their language to the norms of the particular situational context. When necessary, they can be terse, direct, and task-oriented, and in other situations they can be more indirect and polite. For future robots to truly earn the label “social,” it is necessary to develop mechanisms to enable robots with NL capabilities to adjust their language in similar ways. In this paper, we highlight the various dimensions involved in this challenge, and discuss how socially-sensitive natural-language generation can be implemented in a cognitive, robotic architecture.