An Automatic Robot Manzai Generation System

Abstract

This paper proposes an automatic robot manzai (comic dialogue) generation system. In the proposed system, input sentences such as a tale, story, etc. are converted into a manzai script composed of boke (stupid joke) and tsukkomi (comeback). Then, two humanoid robots play the manzai taking roles of a funny man and a straight man, respectively. Their motions are determined from the motion database based on a verb in the utterance. The contributions of the paper are the following three points; a proposal of the novel system for an automatic robot manzai generation which can accept a normal story, convert it to the manzai script and play the manzai: verification of the usefulness of motions in the manzai to make it funnier by experiments: indication of the effectiveness of the proposed system by experiments.