A Survey on Dialogue Management in Human-Robot Interaction

TL;DR

This survey reviews the current state of dialogue management in human-robot interaction, highlighting challenges, evaluation methods, and future research directions for improving social robot communication.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive analysis of dialogue management approaches in HRI, focusing on capabilities, evaluation, and challenges specific to social robots.

Findings

Dialogue managers vary in complexity and capabilities.

Evaluation methods include user studies and performance metrics.

Key challenges involve multimodality and physical situatedness.

Abstract

As social robots see increasing deployment within the general public, improving the interaction with those robots is essential. Spoken language offers an intuitive interface for the human-robot interaction (HRI), with dialogue management (DM) being a key component in those interactive systems. Yet, to overcome current challenges and manage smooth, informative and engaging interaction a more structural approach to combining HRI and DM is needed. In this systematic review, we analyse the current use of DM in HRI and focus on the type of dialogue manager used, its capabilities, evaluation methods and the challenges specific to DM in HRI. We identify the challenges and current scientific frontier related to the DM approach, interaction domain, robot appearance, physical situatedness and multimodality.