"Cool glasses, where did you get them?" Generating Visually Grounded Conversation Starters for Human-Robot Dialogue

Visually situated language interaction is an important challenge in multi-modal Human-Robot Interaction (HRI). In this context we present a data-driven method to generate situated conversation starters based on visual context. We take visual data about the interactants and generate appropriate greetings for conversational agents in the context of HRI. For this, we constructed a novel open-source data set consisting of 4000 HRI-oriented images of people facing the camera, each augmented by three conversation-starting questions. We compared a baseline retrieval-based model and a generative model. Human evaluation of the models using crowdsourcing shows that the generative model scores best, specifically at correctly referencing visual features. We also investigated how automated metrics can be used as a proxy for human evaluation and found that common automated metrics are a poor substitute for human judgement. Finally, we provide a proof-of-concept demonstrator through an interaction with a Furhat social robot.