arXiv subjects

Reid Simmons

Publications and source records attributed to Reid Simmons.

23 records · Page 2Linked to original sources

arXiv2013

Expressing Ethnicity through Behaviors of a Robot Character

Achieving homophily, or association based on similarity, between a human user and a robot holds a promise of improved perception and task performance. However, no previous studies that address homophily via ethnic similarity with robots exist. In this paper, we discuss the difficulties of evoking ethnic cues in a robot, as opposed to a virtual agent, and an approach to overcome those difficulties based on using ethnically salient behaviors. We outline our methodology for selecting and evaluating such behaviors, and culminate with a study that evaluates our hypotheses of the possibility of ethnic attribution of a robot character through verbal and nonverbal behaviors and of achieving the homophily effect.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2012

Heuristic Search Value Iteration for POMDPs

We present a novel POMDP planning algorithm called heuristic search value iteration (HSVI).HSVI is an anytime algorithm that returns a policy and a provable bound on its regret with respect to the optimal policy. HSVI gets its power by combining two well-known techniques: attention-focusing search heuristics and piecewise linear convex representations of the value function. HSVI's soundness and convergence have been proven. On some benchmark problems from the literature, HSVI displays speedups of greater than 100 with respect to other state-of-the-art POMDP value iteration algorithms. We also apply HSVI to a new rover exploration problem 10 times larger than most POMDP problems in the literature.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2012

Point-Based POMDP Algorithms: Improved Analysis and Implementation

Existing complexity bounds for point-based POMDP value iteration algorithms focus either on the curse of dimensionality or the curse of history. We derive a new bound that relies on both and uses the concept of discounted reachability; our conclusions may help guide future algorithm design. We also discuss recent improvements to our (point-based) heuristic search value iteration algorithm. Our new implementation calculates tighter initial bounds, avoids solving linear programs, and makes more effective use of sparsity.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2012

A Cross-cultural Corpus of Annotated Verbal and Nonverbal Behaviors in Receptionist Encounters

We present the first annotated corpus of nonverbal behaviors in receptionist interactions, and the first nonverbal corpus (excluding the original video and audio data) of service encounters freely available online. Native speakers of American English and Arabic participated in a naturalistic role play at reception desks of university buildings in Doha, Qatar and Pittsburgh, USA. Their manually annotated nonverbal behaviors include gaze direction, hand and head gestures, torso positions, and facial expressions. We discuss possible uses of the corpus and envision it to become a useful tool for the human-robot interaction community.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2011

Perception of Personality and Naturalness through Dialogues by Native Speakers of American English and Arabic

Linguistic markers of personality traits have been studied extensively, but few cross-cultural studies exist. In this paper, we evaluate how native speakers of American English and Arabic perceive personality traits and naturalness of English utterances that vary along the dimensions of verbosity, hedging, lexical and syntactic alignment, and formality. The utterances are the turns within dialogue fragments that are presented as text transcripts to the workers of Amazon's Mechanical Turk. The results of the study suggest that all four dimensions can be used as linguistic markers of all personality traits by both language communities. A further comparative analysis shows cross-cultural differences for some combinations of measures of personality traits and naturalness, the dimensions of linguistic variability and dialogue acts.

cs.CL↗