Can a Humanoid Robot be part of the Organizational Workforce? A User Study Leveraging Sentiment Analysis
This addresses the problem of integrating humanoid robots into organizational workforces for customer service, though it is incremental as it applies existing sentiment analysis techniques to a new context.
The study investigated whether a humanoid robot (Nadine) could function as a customer service agent in a workplace by analyzing its effects on customers and ability to handle social scenarios, using surveys and a novel sentic computing method for sentiment analysis to identify customer expectations and robot limitations.
Hiring robots for the workplaces is a challenging task as robots have to cater to customer demands, follow organizational protocols and behave with social etiquette. In this study, we propose to have a humanoid social robot, Nadine, as a customer service agent in an open social work environment. The objective of this study is to analyze the effects of humanoid robots on customers at work environment, and see if it can handle social scenarios. We propose to evaluate these objectives through two modes, namely, survey questionnaire and customer feedback. We also propose a novel approach to analyze customer feedback data (text) using sentic computing methods. Specifically, we employ aspect extraction and sentiment analysis to analyze the data. From our framework, we detect sentiment associated to the aspects that mainly concerned the customers during their interaction. This allows us to understand customers expectations and current limitations of robots as employees.