Planning and Realizing Questions in Situated Human-Robot Interaction

This paper is about generating questions in human-robot interaction. We survey existing work on the forms and meanings of questions in English and discuss the pragmatic effects resulting from an interplay between the choice of syntactic form and intonation. We propose an approach to formalization based on a notion of common ground and commitment, set in a model of situated dialogue as part of collaborative activity where we explicitly model the beliefs and intentions of both the robot and the human. Questions come about by abductively inferring an intentional structure grounded in the belief model and indicating commitments. Content planning and surface realization turn this into a question of the appropriate form.