Towards Robot Moderators: Understanding Goal-Directed Multi-Party Interactions

Socially Assistive Robotics (SAR) is a growing field dedicated to developing models and algorithms that enable robots to help people achieve goals through social interaction (Feil-Seifer and Mataric 2005). Prior work in this field has focused on one-on-one interactions, but there is interest in extending this work to multi-party interactions. We contribute to the study of multi-party SAR by defining the role of moderator, an agent that is responsible for directing an interaction, but is not necessarily directly participating in the task. We present a computational formalization of the task of moderation as the process by which a goal-directed multi-party interaction is regulated via manipulation of interaction resources, including both physical resources, such as an object or a tool, and social resources, such as the conversational floor or participants' attention. Finally, we present preliminary results of an analysis of self-moderated multi-party human-human interaction that support several of the underlying assumptions of this formalization.