Reading with Robots: Towards a Human-Robot Book Discussion System for Elderly Adults

摘要

As people age, it is critical that they maintain not only their physical health, but also their cognitive health - for instance, by engaging in cognitive exercise. Recent advancements in AI have uncovered novel ways through which to facilitate such exercise. In this thesis, I propose the first human-robot dialogue system designed specifically to promote cognitive exercise in elderly adults, through discussions about interesting metaphors in books. I describe my work to date, including the development of a new, large corpus and an approach for automatically scoring metaphor novelty. Finally, I outline my plans for incorporating this work into the proposed system.