NumberI-1-4
Title Acquiring the meaning of sentence-final particles yo and ne through human-robot interaction
Authors Natsuki Oka (Kyoto Institute of Technology)
Ryoma Ogami (Kyoto Institute of Technology)
Xia Wu (Kyoto Institute of Technology)
Chie Fukada (Kyoto Institute of Technology)
Motoyuki Ozeki (Kyoto Institute of Technology)
Abstract Sentence-final particles serve an important role in (spoken) Japanese, because they express the speaker's mental attitudes toward the proposition and/or the interlocutor. They are acquired at early ages and occur very frequently in everyday conversation. There has been, however, little proposal for the computational model of the acquisition of sentence-final particles. The purpose of this study is to get a robot to learn how to act upon the utterance with a sentence-final particle. The robot learns appropriate responses based on the rewards given by the interlocutor. The experimental results show that the robot learns to behave correctly in response to yo, which expresses the speaker's intention to communicate new information, and to ne, which denotes the speaker's desire to confirm that some information is shared. Using the learned actions as a lead, the acquisition of inner information processing such as word learning is the next research target.
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