This research investigates the impact of social robot participation in group conversations and assesses the effectiveness of various addressing policies. The study involved 300 participants, divided into groups of four, interacting with a humanoid robot serving as the moderator. The robot utilized conversation data to determine the most appropriate speaker to address. The findings indicate that the robot's addressing policy significantly influenced conversation dynamics, resulting in more balanced attention to each participant and a reduction in subgroup formation.
@article{arxiv.2408.00151,
title = {Moderating Group Conversation Dynamics with Social Robots},
author = {Lucrezia Grassi and Carmine Tommaso Recchiuto and Antonio Sgorbissa},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2408.00151},
year = {2024}
}
Comments
6 pages, 6 figures, 1 table. Accepted at the workshop on advancing Group Understanding and robots' adaptive behavior (GROUND), held at the Robotics Science and Systems (RSS) Conference, 2024