Spoken Language Processing in a Conversational System for Child-Robot Interaction

We describe a conversational system for child-robot interaction built with an event-based integration approach using the NAO robot platform with the URBI middleware within the ALIZ-E project. Our integrated system includes components for the recognition, interpretation and generation of speech and gestures, dialogue management and user modeling. We describe our approach to processing spoken input and output and highlight some practical implementation issues. We also present preliminary results from experiments where young Italian users interacted with the system.