Have we met? MDP based speaker ID for robot dialogue

Abstract

We present a novel approach to speaker identification in robot dialogue that allows a robot to recognize people during natural conversation and address them by name. Our STanford AI Robot (STAIR) dialogue system attempts to mirror the human speaker identification process. We model the robot dialogue problem as a Markov Decision Process (MDP) and apply a reinforcement learning algorithm to try to learn the optimal dialogue actions. The MDP model works in conjunction with a traditional statistical cluster based speaker identification subsystem. Our approach also addresses open-set speaker identification, dynamically adding new speaker profiles as well as continuously updating known profiles. Index Terms: dialogue, MDP, speaker identification, speaker recognition, robot conversation