Making Pepper Understand and Respond in Romanian

Within the larger project ROBIN, focused on the development of software and services for human-robot interaction, we present here a set of activities focused on the creation and enhancement of language resources necessary for making dialogue possible between humans and the robot Pepper. More precisely, we describe the preparatory activities for turning the robot Pepper into a dialog partner for a human by using the Romanian language. The language resources that have been created are a lexicon, a language model, and an acoustic language model. They have been enhanced by using other language resources, such as the Romanian wordnet and word embeddings extracted from the large Romanian reference corpus CoRoLa. They will ensure oral communication within some envisaged microworlds, thus they are specific to these microworlds. These resources have been carefully curated and evaluated.