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Therapist-Centered Design of a Robot’s Dialogue Behavior

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Abstract

Significant research effort has already been invested in the field of robot-assisted therapy for children with developmental disorders, and the researchers generally agree that therapists should be involved in the development of assistive robotic tools. However, relatively little attention has been devoted to robots’ capacity to autonomously engage in a natural language dialogue in the context of robot-assisted therapy. This paper focuses on this desideratum. It introduces a programming platform that enables the therapist to design a robot’s dialogue behavior. To the extent that the platform is domain-independent, it enables the therapist to flexibly model (1) the interaction domain and the lexicon, (2) the interaction context, and (3) the robot’s dialogue strategy. To the extent that the platform is therapist-centered, it is motivated by real-life difficulties that therapists encounter while trying to specify a robot’s dialogue behavior and can be used by nontechnical therapists in a user-friendly and intuitive manner. In addition, the platform (4) enables the therapist to test dialogue strategies independently of therapeutic settings, and (5) provides estimated cognitive load placed on the child while trying to process the therapist’s dialogue acts.

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Acknowledgments

The presented study is performed as part of the projects “Design of Robots as Assistive Technology for the Treatment of Children with Developmental Disorders” (III44008) and “Development of Dialogue Systems for Serbian and Other South Slavic Languages” (TR32035), funded by the Ministry of Education, Science, and Technological Development of the Republic of Serbia. The responsibility for the content of this paper lies with the author.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Faculty of Technical Sciences, University of Novi Sad, Trg Dositeja Obradovića 6, 21000, Novi Sad, Serbia

    Milan Gnjatović

  2. Graduate School of Computer Sciences, Megatrend University, Bulevar umetnosti 29, 11070, Belgrade, Serbia

    Milan Gnjatović

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  1. Milan Gnjatović
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Correspondence to Milan Gnjatović.

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Gnjatović, M. Therapist-Centered Design of a Robot’s Dialogue Behavior. Cogn Comput 6, 775–788 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12559-014-9272-1

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