Enabling Morally Sensitive Robotic Clarification Requests

TL;DR

This paper introduces a method for robots to perform moral reasoning on ambiguous human utterances before requesting clarification, improving moral communication and perception in human-robot interactions.

Contribution

It presents a novel approach integrating moral reasoning into clarification requests within the DIARC robot architecture, enhancing ethical communication.

Findings

The approach reduces miscommunication of moral dispositions.

It improves human perception of robot moral behavior.

The method is validated through a human subjects experiment.

Abstract

The design of current natural language oriented robot architectures enables certain architectural components to circumvent moral reasoning capabilities. One example of this is reflexive generation of clarification requests as soon as referential ambiguity is detected in a human utterance. As shown in previous research, this can lead robots to (1) miscommunicate their moral dispositions and (2) weaken human perception or application of moral norms within their current context. We present a solution to these problems by performing moral reasoning on each potential disambiguation of an ambiguous human utterance and responding accordingly, rather than immediately and naively requesting clarification. We implement our solution in the DIARC robot architecture, which, to our knowledge, is the only current robot architecture with both moral reasoning and clarification request generation capabilities. We then evaluate our method with a human subjects experiment, the results of which indicate that our approach successfully ameliorates the two identified concerns.