Embodiment of an Agent by a Pepper Robot for Explaining Retrieval Results

Conceptually, an agent perceives its environment through sensors, builds a set of models, and then uses these models to select an appropriate action to fulfill its goals. As long as an agent is embodied by a robot, even humans that are not familiar with the concept of an agent, are more likely aware of the presence of an individual, independent of how the agent maps state sequences to actions, than if an agent is part of a web application. In the latter, agents are sometimes visualized as an animation, such as Clippy by Microsoft. Thus, depending on the context, it is often explicitly desired, that humans are aware of an individual, while they interact with a system. Our aim is to demonstrate the prototype of our information retrieval (IR) agent, running in the background of our information system (IS), implemented for humanities scholars. Instead of animating our IR agent, we embodied it by a Pepper robot for demonstration purposes only. Pepper is a humanoid robot especially designed for the interaction with humans, as he has among others a speech-to-text and text-to-speech module allowing for a verbal conversation between a human and the robot. We tested our approach with humans of which not everyone was familiar with the concept of an IR agent. During the interaction with our IS, Pepper explains, as the IR agent, his behavior. The embodiment of our IR agent, using Pepper, helps to understand the concept of an IR agent and that it is running in the background of our IS, without explaining that explicitly.