Towards a dialog strategy for handling miscommunication in human-robot dialog

Abstract

This paper presents a first theoretical framework for a dialog strategy handling miscommunication in natural language Human-Robot Interaction (HRI). On the one hand the dialog strategy is deduced from findings about human-human communication patterns and coping strategies for miscommunication. On the other hand, relevant cognitive theories concerning human perception serve as a conceptual basis for the dialog strategy. The novel approach is firstly to combine these communication patterns with coping strategies and cognitive theories from human-human interaction (HHI) and secondly transfer them to HRI as a general dialog strategy for handling miscommunication. The presented approach is applicable to any task-oriented dialog. In a first step the conversational context is confined to route descriptions, given that asking for directions is an restricted but nevertheless challenging example for task-oriented dialog between humans and a robot.