The paper proposes possible use of interactive robots in the remedial practice for children with autism, who have difficulties mainly in interpersonal communication. For this purpose, we built a small creature-like robot, Keepon, which was carefully designed to get autistic and non-autistic children involved in playful interaction. We observed how autistic children (2-4 years old) interacted with Keepon without any experimental setting or instructions in a playroom at a day-care center for children with special needs. From the longitudinal observation for a year and a half (totally, over 500 child-sessions), we found that Keepon's simple appearance and predictable responses gave the autistic children a playful and relaxed mood, in which they spontaneously engaged in dyadic play with Keepon, which would then expand into interpersonal communication where Keepon worked as the pivot of triadic play with adults or other children. Each child showed a different style and a different unfolding of interaction over time, which tell us a "story" of his or her personality and developmental profile, which would not be explained thoroughly by a diagnostic label like "autism".

Keepon is a small creature-like robot designed for simple, natural, nonverbal interaction with children. The minimal design of Keepon's appearance and behavior is meant to intuitively and comfortably convey the robot's expressions of attention and emotion. For the past few years, we have been observing interactions between Keepon and children at various levels of physical, mental, and social development. With typically developing children, we have observed varying styles of play that suggest a progression in ontological understanding of the robot. With children suffering from developmental disorders such as autism, we have observed interactive behaviors that suggest Keepon's design is effective in eliciting a motivation to share mental states. Finally, in developing technology for interpersonal coordination and interactional synchrony, we have observed an important role of rhythm in establishing engagement between people and robots. This paper presents a comprehensive survey of work done with Keepon to date. Some portions of this paper are modified from content appearing in [28-32, 34, 35].

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This paper proposes a new indicator of text structure, called the lexical cohesion profile (LCP), which locates segment boundaries in a text. A text segment is a coherent scene; the words in a segment a~e linked together via lexical cohesion relations. LCP records mutual similarity of words in a sequence of text. The similarity of words, which represents their cohesiveness, is computed using a semantic network. Comparison with the text segments marked by a number of subjects shows that LCP closely correlates with the human judgments. LCP may provide valuable information for resolving anaphora and ellipsis.

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