Adapting a Robot's linguistic style based on socially-aware reinforcement learning

When looking at Socially Interactive Robots, adaptation to the user's preferences plays an important role in today's Human-Robot Interaction to keep interaction interesting and engaging over a long period of time. Findings indicate an increase in user engagement for robots with adaptive behavior and personality, but also that it depends on the task context whether a similar or opposing robot personality is preferred. We present an approach based on Reinforcement Learning, which gets its reward directly from social signals in real-time during the interaction, to quickly learn about and dynamically address individual human preferences. Our scenario involves a Reeti robot in the role of a story teller talking about the main characters in the novel “Alice's Adventures in Wonderland” by generating descriptions with varying degree of introversion/extraversion. After initial simulation results, an interactive prototype is presented which allows to explore the learning process adapting to the human interaction partner's engagement.