[3J3-E-4] Robots and real worlds: Human Interactions

[3J3-E-4-02] Eye-gaze in Social Robot Interactions

Grounding of Information and Eye-gaze Patterns

Koki Ijuin², 〇Kristiina Jokinen Jokinen¹, Tsuneo Kato², Seiichi Yamamoto² (1. AIRC, AIST Tokyo Waterfront, 2. Doshisha University)

Keywords:eye-tracking, eye-gaze patterns, grounding, human-robot interaction

This paper examines human-robot interactions and focuses on the use of eye-gaze patterns in evaluating the partner’s understanding process. The goal of the research is to understand better how humans focus their attention when interacting with a robot and to build a model for natural gaze patters to improve the robot’s engagement and interaction capabilities. The work is based on the AIST Multimodal Corpus which contains human-human and human-robot interactions on two different activities: instruction dialogues and story-telling dialogues. The preliminary experiments show that there are differences in the eye-gaze patterns given expected and non-expected responses, which affects their understanding and grounding of the presented information. The paper corroborates with the hypothesis that eye-gaze patterns can be used to predict grounding process and provide information to the speaker about how to proceed with the presentation, so as to support the partner’s understanding and building of the mutual knowledge. Some consideration is given to future improvements in methodology