Lexical entrainment in human-robot interaction: Can robots entrain human vocabulary?

A communication robot must recognize a referred-to object to support us in daily life. However, using our wide human vocabulary, we often refer to objects in terms that are incomprehensible to the robot. This paper focuses on lexical entrainment to solve this problem. Lexical entrainment is the phenomenon of people tending to adopt the terms of their interlocutor. While this has been well studied in human-computer interaction, few published papers have approached it in human-robot interaction. To investigate how lexical entrainment occurs in human-robot interaction, we conduct experiments where people instruct the robot to move objects. Our results show that two types of lexical entrainment occur in human-robot interaction. We also discuss the effects of the state of objects on lexical entrainment. Finally, we developed a test bed system for recognizing a referred-to object on the basis of knowledge from our experiments.