ToD4IR: A Humanised Task-Oriented Dialogue System for Industrial Robots

Abstract

Despite the fact that task-oriented conversation systems have received much attention from the dialogue research community, only a handful of them have been studied in a real-world manufacturing context using industrial robots. One stumbling block is the lack of a domain-specific discourse corpus for training these systems. Another difficulty is that earlier attempts to integrate natural language interfaces (such as chatbots) into the industrial sector have primarily focused on task completion rates. When designing a dialogue system for social robots, the user experience is prioritized above industrial robots. To overcome these challenges, we provide the Industrial Robots Domain Wizard-of-Oz dataset (IRWoZ), a fully-labeled discourse dataset covering four robotics domains. It delivers simulated discussions between shop floor workers and industrial robots, with over 401 dialogues, to promote language-assisted Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) in industrial settings. Small talk concepts and human-to-human conversation strategies are provided to support human-like answer generation and give a more natural and adaptable dialogue environment to increase user experience and engagement. Finally, we propose and evaluate an end-to-end Task-oriented Dialogue for Industrial Robots (ToD4IR) using two types of pre-trained backbone models: GPT-2 and GPT-Neo, on the IRWoZ dataset. We performed a series of trials to validate ToD4IR’s performance in a real manufacturing context. Our experiments demonstrate that ToD4IR outperforms three downstream task-oriented dialogue tasks, i.e., dialogue state tracking, dialogue act generation, and response generation, on the IRWoZ dataset. Our source code of ToD4IR and the IRWoZ dataset is accessible at https://github.com/lcroy/ToD4IR for reproducible research.

Keywords

• Natural language processing
• interactive systems
• data collection
• neural networks
• human–robot interaction