Reformulation Strategies of Repeated References in the Context of Robot Perception Errors in Situated Dialogue

We performed an experiment in which human participants interacted through a natural language dialogue interface with a simulated robot to fulfil a series of object manipulation tasks. We introduced errors into the robot’s perception, and observed the resulting problems in the dialogues and their resolutions. We then introduced different methods for the user to request information about the robot’s understanding of the environment. In this work, we describe the effects that the robot’s perceptual errors and the information request options available to the participant had on the reformulation of the referring expressions the participants used when resolving a unsuccessful reference.