Shaping dialogues with a humanoid robot based on an E-learning system

This paper examines a type of dialogue between an instructor and a humanoid robot, which is particularly appropriate for a situation wherein students listen to an instructor-robot dialogue in a classroom. The type of dialogue is extracted from comedy routines, movie plots, and a science experiment-based television program. The general structure of the dialogue is a series of activation, core, and feedback events. To interact with students and to obtain information from a web-based learning system, the activation and feedback are assigned to the instructor, whereas the robot participates in the core. In the activation phase, the instructor provides a topic keyword to enable the robot to submit a universal resource locator query request. The Topic Maps ontology of the web system enables the robot to speak regarding the topic in the core phase. Finally, the instructor clarifies the point in the feedback phase to motivate the interest and fun of the topic.