The Curious Robot as a Case Study for Comparing Dialogue Systems

Modeling interaction with robots raises new and different challenges for dialogue modeling than traditional dialogue modeling with lessembodied machines. We present four case studies of implementing a typical human-robot interaction (HRI) scenario with different stateof-the-art dialogue frameworks in order to identify challenges and pitfalls specific to HRI and potential solutions. The results are discussed with a special focus on the interplay between dialogue and task modeling on robots. Instead of designing interactions for information-oriented query systems--which have also been extended to virtual agents--it has now become necessary to take physical situatedness into account. This means that questions of reactability to dynamic environments, possibly involving multiple modalities, and of potentially open-ended, unstructured interactions, involving multiple tasks at a time, play an important role and have to be considered in the dialogue model.