Dynamic extension of a grammar-based dialogue system: constructing an all-recipes knowing robot

Abstract

In the upcoming field of humanoid and human-friendly robots, the ability of the robot for simple, unconstrained and natural communication with its users is of central importance. The basis for appropriate actions of the robot is the correct understanding of the user utterances. To be able to cover all the entities a user might talk about, we enhanced our dialogue manager with an ability for dynamic vocabulary generation out of information found across the internet. As a test case, we chose an internet recipe database integrated in the dialogue manager of our household robot so that it can understand several thousand recipes and ingredients now. Index Terms: dialogue management, human-robot interaction, vocabulary extension