New research published on dialog modelling in social robots

Listening to one another is essential to human-human interaction. In fact, we humans spend a substantial part of our day listening to other people, in private as well as in work settings. Attentive listening serves the function to gather information for oneself, but at the same time, it also signals to the speaker that he/she is being heard.
To deduce whether our interlocutor is listening to us, we are relying on reading his/her nonverbal cues, very much like how we also use non-verbal cues to signal our attention. Such signalling becomes more complex when we move from dyadic to multi-party interactions.
Understanding how humans use nonverbal cues in a multi-party listening context not only increases our understanding of human-human communication but also aids the development of successful human-robot interactions.

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