KIDE4I: A Generic Semantics-Based Task-Oriented Dialogue System for Human-Machine Interaction in Industry 5.0

Abstract

In Industry 5.0, human workers and their wellbeing are placed at the centre of the production process. In this context, task-oriented dialogue systems allow workers to delegate simple tasks to industrial assets while working on other, more complex ones. The possibility of naturally interacting with these systems reduces the cognitive demand to use them and triggers acceptation. Most modern solutions, however, do not allow a natural communication, and modern techniques to obtain such systems require large amounts of data to be trained, which is scarce in these scenarios. To overcome these challenges, this paper presents KIDE4I (Knowledge-drIven Dialogue framEwork for Industry), a semantic-based task-oriented dialogue system framework for industry that allows workers to naturally interact with industrial systems, is easy to adapt to new scenarios and does not require great amounts of data to be constructed. This work also reports the process to adapt KIDE4I to new scenarios. To validate and evaluate KIDE4I, it has been adapted to four use cases that are relevant to industrial scenarios following the described methodology, and two of them have been evaluated through two user studies. The system has been considered as accurate, useful, efficient, not demanding cognitively, flexible and fast. Furthermore, subjects view the system as a tool to improve their productivity and security while carrying out their tasks.

Keywords

• task-oriented dialogue systems
• human-machine interaction
• Industry 5.0
• semantics
• natural language processing
• collaborative robotics