Just Keep Tweeting, Dear: Web-Mining Methods for Helping a Social Robot Understand User Needs

An intelligent system of the future should make its user feel comfortable, which is impossible without understanding context they coexist in. However, our past research did not treat language information as a part of the context a robot works in, and data about reasons why the user had made his decisions was not obtained. Therefore, we decided to utilize the Web as a knowledge source to discover context information that could suggest a robot's behavior when it acquires verbal information from its user or users. By comparing user utterances (blogs, Twitter or Facebook entries, not direct orders) with other people's written experiences (mostly blogs), a system can judge whether it is a situation in which the robot can perform or improve its performance. In this paper we introduce several methods that can be applied to a simple floor-cleaning robot. We describe basic experiments showing that text processing is helpful when dealing with multiple users who are not willing to give rich feedback. For example, we describe a method for finding usual reasons for cleaning on the Web by using Okapi BM25 to extract feature words from sentences retrieved by the query word "cleaning". Then, we introduce our ideas for dealing with conflicts of interest in multiuser environments and possible methods for avoiding such conflicts by achieving better situation understanding. Also, an emotion recognizer for guessing user needs and moods and a method to calculate situation naturalness are described.