Constructive Interaction for Talking about Interesting Topics

Proceedings of the Eighth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2012)

Abstract

The paper discusses mechanisms for topic management in conversations, concentrating on interactions where the interlocutors react to each other's presentation of new information and construct a shared context in which to exchange information about interesting topics. This is illustrated with a robot simulator that can talk about unrestricted (open-domain) topics that the human interlocutor shows interest in. Wikipedia is used as the source of information from which the robotic agent draws its world knowledge.