Toward a context-based approach to assess engagement in human-robot social interaction

Abstract

This article addresses the issue of evaluating Human-Robot spoken interactions in a social context by considering the engagement of the human participant. Our work regards the Communication Accommodation Theory (CAT) as a promising paradigm to consider for engagement, by its study of macro- and micro-contexts influencing the behaviour of dialogue participants (DPs), and by its effort in depicting the accommodation process underlying the behaviour of DPs. We draw links between the accommodation process described in this theory and human engagement that could be fruitfully used to evaluate Human-Robot social interactions. We present our goal which is to take into account a model of dialogue activities providing a convenient local interpretation context to assess human contributions (involving verbal and nonverbal channels) along with CAT to assess Human-Robot social interaction.