A Database of Multimodal Data to Construct a Simulated Dialogue Partner with Varying Degrees of Cognitive Health
An assistive robot that could communicate with dementia patients would have great social benefit. An assistive robot Pepper has been designed to administer Referential Communication Tasks (RCTs) to human subjects without dementia as a step towards an agent to administer RCTs to dementia patients, potentially for earlier diagnosis. Currently, Pepper follows a rigid RCT script, which affects the user experience. We aim to replace Pepper’s RCT script with a dialogue management approach, to generate more natural interactions with RCT subjects. A Partially Observable Markov Decision Process (POMDP) dialogue policy will be trained using reinforcement learning, using simulated dialogue partners. This paper describes two RCT datasets and a methodology for their use in creating a database that the simulators can access for training the POMDP policies.
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