Related papers: No More Mumbles: Enhancing Robot Intelligibility t…
Underground stations are a common communication situation in towns: we talk with friends or colleagues, listen to announcements or shop for titbits while background noise and reverberation are challenging communication. Here, we perform an…
Autonomous robots operating in open and changing environments cannot always rely on predefined inputs, outputs, and action routines. Although existing learning methods enable robots to improve their performance through environmental…
With the growing capabilities of intelligent systems, the integration of robots in our everyday life is increasing. However, when interacting in such complex human environments, the occasional failure of robotic systems is inevitable. The…
The use of natural language and voice-based interfaces gradu-ally transforms how consumers search, shop, and express their preferences. The current work explores how changes in the syntactical structure of the interaction with…
Whilst state of the art automatic speech recognition (ASR) can perform well, it still degrades when exposed to acoustic environments that differ from those used when training the model. Unfamiliar environments for a given model may well be…
When speaking in presence of background noise, humans reflexively change their way of speaking in order to improve the intelligibility of their speech. This reflex is known as Lombard effect. Collecting speech in Lombard conditions is…
Dialogue systems, also called chatbots, are now used in a wide range of applications. However, they still have some major weaknesses. One key weakness is that they are typically trained from manually-labeled data and/or written with…
With the rapid development of artificial intelligence, conversational bots have became prevalent in mainstream E-commerce platforms, which can provide convenient customer service timely. To satisfy the user, the conversational bots need to…
One of the long-term goals of artificial intelligence is to build an agent that can communicate intelligently with human in natural language. Most existing work on natural language learning relies heavily on training over a pre-collected…
Displaying a written transcript of what a human said (i.e. producing an "automatic speech recognition transcript") is a common feature for smartphone vocal assistants: the utterance produced by a human speaker (e.g. a question) is displayed…
Humans' experience of the world is profoundly multimodal from the beginning, so why do existing state-of-the-art language models only use text as a modality to learn and represent semantic meaning? In this paper we review the literature on…
Speech recognition is very challenging in student learning environments that are characterized by significant cross-talk and background noise. To address this problem, we present a bilingual speech recognition system that uses an…
Natural-language dialog is key for intuitive human-robot interaction. It can be used not only to express humans' intents, but also to communicate instructions for improvement if a robot does not understand a command correctly. Of great…
This paper presents Affecta-context, a general framework to facilitate behavior adaptation for social robots. The framework uses information about the physical context to guide its behaviors in human-robot interactions. It consists of two…
Intelligent agents such as robots are increasingly deployed in real-world, safety-critical settings. It is vital that these agents are able to explain the reasoning behind their decisions to human counterparts, however, their behavior is…
Profanity is nearly as old as language itself, and cursing has become particularly ubiquitous within the last century. At the same time, robots in personal and service applications are often overly polite, even though past work demonstrates…
In the field of Geriatronics, enabling effective and transparent communication between humans and robots is crucial for enhancing the acceptance and performance of assistive robots. Our early-stage research project investigates the…
The lack of time-efficient and reliable evaluation methods hamper the development of conversational dialogue systems (chatbots). Evaluations requiring humans to converse with chatbots are time and cost-intensive, put high cognitive demands…
Spoken language is the most natural way for a human to communicate with a robot. It may seem intuitive that a robot should communicate with users in their native language. However, it is not clear if a user's perception of a robot is…
The development of embodied agents that can communicate with humans in natural language has gained increasing interest over the last years, as it facilitates the diffusion of robotic platforms in human-populated environments. As a step…