Furhat goes to Robotville: a large-scale multiparty human-robot interaction data collection in a public space

Abstract

In the four days of the Robotville exhibition at the London Science Museum, UK, during which the back-projected head Furhat in a situated spoken dialogue system was seen by almost 8 000 visitors, we collected a database of 10 000 utterances spoken to Furhat in situated interaction. The data collection is an example of a particular kind of corpus collection of human-machine dialogues in public spaces that has several interesting and specific characteristics, both with respect to the technical details of the collection and with respect to the resulting corpus contents. In this paper, we take the Furhat data collection as a starting point for a discussion of the motives for this type of data collection, its technical peculiarities and prerequisites, and the characteristics of the resulting corpus. 1.