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About

Ron Artstein is a computational linguist and dialogue systems researcher whose work sits at the intersection of human-robot interaction, natural language processing, and social robotics. His research focuses on developing and evaluating dialogue systems that enable meaningful, naturalistic communication between humans and robotic or virtual agents, with particular emphasis on collaborative tasks such as robot navigation and search-and-rescue scenarios. Among his most influential contributions is his investigation into how social dialogue affects trust in human-robot interaction, exploring whether rapport-building can buffer or amplify the damage caused by conversational errors—work that has garnered over 57 citations. Artstein has also made significant methodological contributions through Wizard-of-Oz approaches to collecting human-robot dialogue data, enabling richer corpus development for training future systems. His augmentation of Abstract Meaning Representation (AMR) for situated dialogue demonstrates his commitment to bridging linguistic theory and practical robotics applications. Through projects like the Niki and Julie multimodal interaction corpus and studies on human swarm coordination, Artstein has expanded the scope of dialogue research to encompass virtual agents and multi-robot teams. His cumulative body of work reflects a sustained effort to make human-machine communication more natural, robust, and trustworthy—providing foundational resources and frameworks that continue to guide researchers in dialogue systems and social robotics.