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

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