Laying Down the Yellow Brick Road: Development of a Wizard-of-Oz\n Interface for Collecting Human-Robot Dialogue

Abstract

We describe the adaptation and refinement of a graphical user interface\ndesigned to facilitate a Wizard-of-Oz (WoZ) approach to collecting human-robot\ndialogue data. The data collected will be used to develop a dialogue system for\nrobot navigation. Building on an interface previously used in the development\nof dialogue systems for virtual agents and video playback, we add templates\nwith open parameters which allow the wizard to quickly produce a wide variety\nof utterances. Our research demonstrates that this approach to data collection\nis viable as an intermediate step in developing a dialogue system for physical\nrobots in remote locations from their users - a domain in which the human and\nrobot need to regularly verify and update a shared understanding of the\nphysical environment. We show that our WoZ interface and the fixed set of\nutterances and templates therein provide for a natural pace of dialogue with\ngood coverage of the navigation domain.\n