Lexical Entrainment in Human Robot Interaction

• Published in: International journal of social robotics Vol. 7; no. 2; pp. 253 - 263
• Main Authors: Iio Takamasa, Shiomi Masahiro, Shinozawa Kazuhiko, Shimohara Katsunori, Miki Mitsunori, Hagita Norihiro
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Dordrecht Springer Nature B.V 01.04.2015
• Subjects: Entrainment; Human engineering; Natural language; Natural language (computers); Robots
• ISSN: 1875-4791; 1875-4805
• DOI: 10.1007/s12369-014-0255-x

This paper reveals that lexical entrainment, in which a person tends to change her verbal expressions to match those said by her addressee, occurs in interactions between people and a robot when they refer to an object in a shared physical space. Many studies argue that lexical entrainment is crucial for understanding the principle of human dialogue and the development of the natural language interfaces of artificial media. However, few studies of it exist in human robot interaction in which humans and robot share a physical space. If lexical entrainment occurs in situations where a physical space is shared with a robot, such findings will contribute to the development of natural language interfaces with social robots. We designed experimental tests in which participants refer to an object and a robot confirms it and measured the extent to which the participants repeated the same verbal expressions said by the robot. Our subjects tended to adopt both the same verbal expressions and lexical categories as the robot.