A Novel Greeting Selection System for a Culture-Adaptive Humanoid Robot

Abstract

Robots, especially humanoids, are expected to perform human-like actions and adapt to our ways of communication in order to facilitate their acceptance in human society. Among humans, rules of communication change depending on background culture: greetings are a part of communication in which cultural differences are strong. Robots should adapt to these specific differences in order to communicate effectively, being able to select the appropriate manner of greeting for different cultures depending on the social context. In this paper, we present the modelling of social factors that influence greeting choice, and the resulting novel culture-dependent greeting gesture and words selection system. An experiment with German participants was run using the humanoid robot ARMAR-IIIb. Thanks to this system, the robot, after interacting with Germans, can perform greeting gestures appropriate to German culture in addition to a repertoire of greetings appropriate to Japanese culture.

Code-Switched Greeting by Bilingual Saudi-American Subject: A Case Study

“…Further explanation, this study shows that the subject perceived and comprehended greeting parameters of both contexts from adults' social communications, however she applies what engages her socially with others in greeting act. Also, this agrees with the contention of Arab World English Journal www.awej.org ISSN: 2229-9327 343 Trovato et al (2015) and Pinto (2008) in specifying the nature of the greeting act-as it is culturally comprehended and implemented within its act. Thus, the subject also ignores males, as long as she receives not much attention or greeting from them, and until now conceptually she might be believing that she doesn't have to greet them.…”

“…Thus, greeting contains certain rules and boundaries of engagement in human interaction, which shape the notion of greeting, though it differs among different cultures (Knuf, 1989). Human greeting may include facial expressions, gestures, verbal movement, and certain utterances-with regard to cultural norms and traditions (Trovato et al, 2015). Holmes and Wilson (2017) state: "Greeting formulas universally serve an affective function of establishing non-Arab World English Journal www.awej.org ISSN: 2229-9327 338 threatening contact and rapport but their precise content is clearly culture specific" (p. 308) in which all these formulas extendedly lead to various complications.…”

“…On the other hand, Brenner and Mueller (1982), Lokken (2006) and Stambak and Verba (1986) confirm that the act of playing, somehow, avoid toddlers of being engaged in certain interactions. Thus, some research studies specify the difficulty of human greeting due to its engagement differences vis-a-vis cultures (Rababah & Malkawi, 2012;Trovato et al, 2015). Though a universal and unified form of greeting was proposed to ease this complication, it has not emerged yet (Trovato et al, 2015).…”

“…Thus, some research studies specify the difficulty of human greeting due to its engagement differences vis-a-vis cultures (Rababah & Malkawi, 2012;Trovato et al, 2015). Though a universal and unified form of greeting was proposed to ease this complication, it has not emerged yet (Trovato et al, 2015). Rababah and Malkawi (2012) believe that the greeting act is even harder for foreigners to maintain; their study finds that different greeting utterances are used by Jordanian people according to the setting, age, sex, and relationship.…”

The CARESSES EU-Japan Project: Making Assistive Robots Culturally Competent

“…Despite these findings, little work has been reported on how to build robots that can be easily adapted to a given cultural identity. An interesting example is the framework for the learning and selection of culturally appropriate greeting gestures and words proposed by Trovato et al [26]. This work, like all the ones mentioned above, consider adaptation at a personal level, and follow a "bottom-up" approach, i.e., they identify nations as clusters of people with similar cultural profiles.…”