Working with Troubles and Failures in Conversation Between Humans and Robots

In order to carry out human-robot collaborative tasks efficiently, robots have to be able to communicate with their human counterparts. In many applications, speech interfaces are deployed as a way to empower robots with the ability to communicate. Despite the progress made in speech recognition and (multi-modal) dialogue systems, such interfaces continue to be brittle in a number of ways and the experience of the failure of such interfaces is common-place amongst roboticists. Surprisingly, a rigorous and complete analysis of communicative failures is still missing, and the technical literature is positively skewed towards the success and good performance of speech interfaces. In order to address this blind spot and investigate failures in conversations between humans and robots, an interdisciplinary effort is necessary. This workshop aims to raise awareness of said blind spot and provide a platform for discussing communicative troubles and failures in human-robot interactions and potentially related failures in non-robotic speech interfaces. We aim to bring together researchers studying communication in different fields, to start a scrupulous investigation into communicative failures, to begin working on a taxonomy of such failures, and enable a preliminary discussion on possible mitigating strategies. This workshop intends to be a venue where participants can freely discuss the failures they have encountered, to positively and constructively learn from them.