Toward Humanlike Task-Based Dialogue Processing for Human Robot Interaction

Many human social exchanges and coordinated activities critically involve dialogue interactions. Hence, we need to develop natural humanlike dialogue-processing mechanisms for future robots if they are to interact with humans in natural ways. In this article we discuss the challenges of designing such flexible dialoguebased robotic systems. We report results from data we collected in human interaction experiments in the context of a search task and show how we can use these results to build more flexible robotic architectures that are starting to address the challenges of task-based humanlike natural language dialogues on robots. As a result, the ability of future social and service robots to interact with humans in natural ways (Scheutz et al. 2007) will critically depend on developing capabilities of humanlike dialoguebased natural language processing (NLP) in robotic architectures.