FROM PHYSORG
Bilingual, bicultural 'Roboceptionist' on its way
Researchers at the University of Arizona and Carnegie Mellon University are working to create a robot receptionist. What makes the effort novel is that the "roboceptionist" is bilingual and bicultural – a computer with a face and a natural language interface.
A three-year, $1 million grant from the Qatar National Research Foundation is funding basic advances in human-computer interaction. Majd Sakr, a professor at Carnegie Mellon University in Qatar, is the principal investigator on the grant.
Reid Simmons, a professor at Carnegie Mellon's Robotics Institute in Pittsburgh, and Sandiway Fong, a UA associate professor of linguistics and computer science, are the co-PIs. Carnegie Mellon University will provide the robotics innovations, while the UA will supply the language technology.
Fong spent part of his sabbatical leave in 2009-10 at Carnegie Mellon's Qatar campus where an existing version of the roboceptionist, called Hala, greets visitors in English and Arabic.
"They invited me to join the team because they saw opportunities to generalize and improve the limited language capabilities of Hala," said Fong. "They needed Hala to be more flexible in dealing with language input from users. And that is where the University of Arizona comes in. We will provide both the language-specific and inter-language-related cultural capabilities so that this robot can be not just bilingual, but bicultural."
Fong said a bicultural robot is not one that merely switches between English and Arabic, Hala's current format, but also has both modes simultaneously active in order to spot and deal with potential cultural ambiguities and misunderstandings.
"You may speak Arabic, but you may choose to converse with the robot in English," said Fong. "You may be conversing with the sensibility and the cultural background and the idioms from the Arabic world. This robot needs to understand both."
The phrase "week after week," for example, "I'm looking for the group that meets week after week" means "every week" in English. But in some Arabic dialects it can mean "every other week." Only a robot that is simultaneously facile with both lexicons can compute that this phrase is subject to cultural variation and can ask the user for clarification.
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Bilingual, bicultural 'Roboceptionist' on its way
Researchers at the University of Arizona and Carnegie Mellon University are working to create a robot receptionist. What makes the effort novel is that the "roboceptionist" is bilingual and bicultural – a computer with a face and a natural language interface.
A three-year, $1 million grant from the Qatar National Research Foundation is funding basic advances in human-computer interaction. Majd Sakr, a professor at Carnegie Mellon University in Qatar, is the principal investigator on the grant.
Reid Simmons, a professor at Carnegie Mellon's Robotics Institute in Pittsburgh, and Sandiway Fong, a UA associate professor of linguistics and computer science, are the co-PIs. Carnegie Mellon University will provide the robotics innovations, while the UA will supply the language technology.
Fong spent part of his sabbatical leave in 2009-10 at Carnegie Mellon's Qatar campus where an existing version of the roboceptionist, called Hala, greets visitors in English and Arabic.
"They invited me to join the team because they saw opportunities to generalize and improve the limited language capabilities of Hala," said Fong. "They needed Hala to be more flexible in dealing with language input from users. And that is where the University of Arizona comes in. We will provide both the language-specific and inter-language-related cultural capabilities so that this robot can be not just bilingual, but bicultural."
Fong said a bicultural robot is not one that merely switches between English and Arabic, Hala's current format, but also has both modes simultaneously active in order to spot and deal with potential cultural ambiguities and misunderstandings.
"You may speak Arabic, but you may choose to converse with the robot in English," said Fong. "You may be conversing with the sensibility and the cultural background and the idioms from the Arabic world. This robot needs to understand both."
The phrase "week after week," for example, "I'm looking for the group that meets week after week" means "every week" in English. But in some Arabic dialects it can mean "every other week." Only a robot that is simultaneously facile with both lexicons can compute that this phrase is subject to cultural variation and can ask the user for clarification.
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