Who has to do it? the use of personal pronouns in human-human and human-robot-interaction

Brigitte Krenn, Stephanie Gross, Lisa Nussbaumer

Abstract: In human communication, pronouns are an important means of perspective taking, and in particular in task-oriented communication personal pronouns are an indicator of who has to do what at a certain moment in a given task. The ability of handling task-related discourse is a factor for robots to interact with people in their homes in everyday life. Both, learning and resolution of personal pronouns pose a challenge for robot architectures as there has to be a permanent adaptation to the human interlocutor’s use of personal pronouns. Especially the use of ich, du, wir (I, you, we) may be irritating for the robot’s natural language processing system.