‘It is Really Interesting How that Small Robot Impacts Humans.’ The Exploratory Analysis of Human Attitudes Toward the Social Robot Vector in Reddit and Youtube Comments

Abstract

Abstract We present the results of an exploratory analysis of human attitudes toward the social robot Vector. The study was conducted on natural language data (2,635 comments) retrieved from Reddit and YouTube. We describe the tag-set used and the (manual) annotation procedure. We present and compare attitude structures mined from Reddit and YouTube data. Two main findings are described and discussed: almost 20% of comments from both Reddit and YouTube consist of various manifestations of attitudes toward Vector (mainly attribution of autonomy and declaration of feelings toward Vector); Reddit and YouTube comments differ when it comes to revealed attitude structure – the data source matters for attitudes studies.