Furhat at Robotville : A Robot Head Harvesting the Thoughts of the Public through Multi-party Dialogue

Abstract

Abstract. This paper presents a large scale study in a public museum setting, where a back-projected robot head interacted with the visitors in multi-party dialogue. The exhibition was seen by thousands of visitors, resulting in a corpus of about 10.000 user utterances. The task of the system was to collect information on peoples ’ beliefs about the future of robots, in the form of a survey. The data analysis shows that the head and dialogue design allows the system to regulate the turn-taking behaviour, that it is indeed possible for a robot to effectively obtain information from the general public, and that this is facilitated by a multi-party setting. 1