Growing neural gas based conversation selection model for robot partner and human communication system

Elderly people with socially isolated has become an important problem in Japan. Therefore, the introduction robot partner for supporting socially isolated elderly people´s life become of the solutions. This paper discusses conversation selection model using Growing Neural Gas(GNG). The robot partner is composed of a smart device used as a face module and the robot body module with two arms. First we discuss the necessity of robot partner in conjunction with elderly people life support, while we also discuss the connection between conversation selection model and robot partner´s communication ability performance. Next, we propose conversation selection model using GNG for determining robot partner´s utterance from voice recognition result. We conduct experiments to discuss the effectiveness of the proposed method based on GNG and JS divergence. Finally, we show the robot partner´s capability in selecting words while performing conversation using the proposed method.