Shengchen Zhang

Shengchen Zhang, Xiaohua Sun, Weiwei Guo

Successful conversations require speakers to align on the meaning of concepts, a challenging but crucial task for human-robot interaction. Understanding the process of establishing such alignment is hindered by competing interpretations of the term and isolated, unidirectional investigations of its design space. This paper argues for a design-centric understanding of conceptual alignment as a bidirectional and co-constructive process. We introduce a taxonomy that characterizes conceptual alignment dialogues along what triggers its initiation and what level(s) of conceptual understanding it concerns. We further present a dialogue act schema as an operational tool that captures the interactional moves through which alignment is achieved. Together, these contributions provide a structured foundation for analyzing, comparing, and designing conceptual alignment in human-robot interaction.

Shengchen Zhang, Zixuan Wang, Chaoran Chen et al.

Service robots are envisioned to be adaptive to their working environment based on situational knowledge. Recent research focused on designing visual representation of knowledge graphs for expert users. However, how to generate an understandable interface for non-expert users remains to be explored. In this paper, we use knowledge graphs (KGs) as a common ground for knowledge exchange and develop a pattern library for designing KG interfaces for non-expert users. After identifying the types of robotic situational knowledge from the literature, we present a formative study in which participants used cards to communicate the knowledge for given scenarios. We iteratively coded the results and identified patterns for representing various types of situational knowledge. To derive design recommendations for applying the patterns, we prototyped a lab service robot and conducted Wizard-of-Oz testing. The patterns and recommendations could provide useful guidance in designing knowledge-exchange interfaces for robots.