Kerstin Fischer
IFKI, University of Southern Denmark, Denmark
February 2011. Working with Herbert Clark, Dept of Psychology
Alignment in Human-Robot Communication: This project addresses the discourse conditions under which participants align with linguistic features of robot utterances. Earlier work has suggested that alignment occurs in the case of communication problems. However, corpus studies of human-robot dialogues support this finding only for part of the data; in addition, the alignment phenomena observable differ with respect the linguistic features involved, some being related to securing understanding while others are not. The project aims to determine the functions of alignment in human-robot interaction and to uncover how common ground with artificial communication partners is achieved.