Pilot corpus of child-robot interaction in therapeutic settings

Abstract

This paper reports on a pilot corpus of child-robot interaction in therapeutic settings. The corpus comprises recordings of the interactions between twenty-one children and the conversational humanoid robot MARKO, in the kinesitherapeutic room at the Clinic of Paediatric Rehabilitation in Novi Sad, Serbia. The subject group included both healthy children and children with cerebral palsy and similar movement disorders. Approximately 156 minutes of session time was recorded. All dialogues were transcribed, and nonverbal acts were annotated. The initial evaluation of the corpus indicates that children positively respond to MARKO, engage in interaction with MARKO, perform verbal instructions given by MARKO, and experience increased motivation for therapy.