Application of TV program recommendation to communication support between human and partner robot

Abstract

This paper studies the communication support between human and partner robot based on TV program recommendation. It is expected in near future that various robots designed for supporting humans will come into our daily lives. In order for such robots to coexist with humans, those should be recognized as ldquopartnersrdquo for us. Therefore, studying communication between humans and robots is very important. In this paper, we focus on the communication under the situation of watching TV, because TV is bound up with the ordinary, natural rhythms of our daily life. If a robot can estimate our interests / preference by observing our watching behavior and have conversation about the topics we might be interested in, we could recognize the robot as a partner. This paper applies TV program recommendation to communication support between human and partner robot. First, the paper proposes a method for generating user profile for TV program recommendation based on fuzzy inference. The method does not estimate userpsilas interest in a TV program only from its watching time as most of existing methods do, but also from userpsilas utterances by applying sentiment analysis. Experiments are performed with test subjects, and the results show the proposed method can generate a user profile that can reflect userpsilas interests. The paper also introduces a prototype system for studying communication support between human and partner robot under TV watching environment, in which the proposed profile generation method is implemented. The system architecture as well as how it works for TV program recommendation is described.