Towards Automatic Generation of Personality-Adapted Speech and Emotions for a Conversational Companion Robot

Abstract: Previous works in Human-Robot Interaction have demonstrated the positive potential benefit of designing highly anthropomorphic robots. This includes physical appearance but also whether they can express emotions, behave in a congruent manner, etc. This work wants to explore the creation of a robot that is able to express a given personality consistently throughout a dialogue while also manifesting congruent emotional expressions. Personality defines many aspects of the character of a person and it can influence how one speaks, behaves, reacts to events, etc. Here, we only focus our attention on language and on how it changes depending on one particular personality trait, the extraversion. To this end, we tested different language models to automate the process of generating language according to a particular personality. We also compared large language models such as GPT-3 to smaller ones, to analyse how size can correlate to performance in this task. We initially evaluated these methods through a fairly small user study in order to confirm the correct manipulation of personality in a text-only context. Results suggest that personality manipulation and how well it is understood highly depend on the context of a dialogue, with a more ‘personal’ dialogue being more successful in manifesting personality. Also, the performance of GPT-3 is comparable to smaller models, specifically trained, with the main difference only given in the perceived fluency of the generations. We then conducted a follow-up study where we chose to use a robot that is capable of showing different facial expressions used to manifest different emotions, the Furhat robot. We integrated into the robot the generations from our language models together with an emotion classification method that is used to guide its facial expressions. Whilst the output of our models did trigger different emotional expressions, resulting in robots which differed both in their language and nonverbal behaviour, resultant perception of these robots’ personality only approached significance (p ∼ 0.08). In this study, GPT3 performed very similarly to much smaller models, with the difference in fluency also being much smaller than before. We did not see any particular change in the perception of the robots in terms of likeability nor uncanniness.