Dialogue patterns of an Arabic robot receptionist

Hala is a bilingual (Arabic and English) culturally-sensitive robot receptionist located at Carnegie Mellon University in Qatar. We report results from Hala´s deployment by comparing her English dialogue corpus to that of a similar monolingual robot (named ¿Tank¿) located at CMU´s Pittsburgh campus. Specifically, we compare the average number of turns per interaction, duration of interactions, frequency of interactions with personal questions, rate of non-understandings, and rate of thanks after the robot´s answer. We provide possible explanations for observed similarities and differences and highlight potential cultural implications on the interactions.