Software Engineering Institute

This conference paper appears in the 25th IEEE International Symposium on Robot and Human Interactive Communication (August 2016).

With a growing number of robots performing autonomously without human intervention, it is difficult to understand what the robots experience along their routes during execution without looking at execution logs. Rather than looking through logs, our goal is for robots to respond to queries in natural language about what they experience and what routes they have chosen. We propose verbalization as the process of converting route experiences into natural language, and highlight the importance of varying verbalizations based on user preferences. We present our verbalization space representing different dimensions that verbalizations can be varied, and our algorithm for automatically generating them on our CoBot robot. Then we present our study of how users can request different verbalizations in dialog. Using the study data, we learn a language model to map user dialog to the verbalization space. Finally, we demonstrate the use of the learned model within a dialog system in order for any user to request information about CoBot's route experience at varying levels of detail.