Agent Requirements for Effective and Efficient Task-Oriented Dialog

Dialog is a useful way for a robotic agent performing a task to communicate with a human collaborator, as it is a rich source of information for both the agent and the human. Such task-oriented dialog provides a medium for commanding, informing, teaching, and correcting a robot. Robotic agents engaging in dialog must be able to interpret a wide variety of sentences and supplement the dialog with information from its context, history, learned knowledge, and from non-linguistic interactions. We have identified a set of nine system-level requirements for such agents that help them support more effective, efficient, and general task-oriented dialog. This set is inspired by our research in Interactive Task Learning with a robotic agent named Rosie. This paper defines each requirement and gives examples of work we have done that illustrates them.