Bernstein member involved: Florian Röhrbein

Humans already cooperate closely with robots, for example in industrial settings. This is likely to increase in the future. But what do human-robot teams actually talk about at work? And how? “We want to know if people speak differently when they’re working in a team with a robot compared to a team with another human,” says linguist Prof. Christina Sanchez-Stockhammer from Chemnitz University of Technology. Her interdisciplinary team of researchers from neuro-robotics and linguistics conducted experiments in which human participants performed a task together with an industrial robot arm with speech functions. “The obvious choice was to have them assemble a simple IKEA shelf together, because that can be done even without instructions,” reveals robotics engineer Sascha Kaden. “During the process, we recorded the teams and then transcribed and analysed everything they said,” explains linguist Sasha Coelho.

As the researchers expected, purely human teams produced more statements, explanations and particularly questions, while the robot arm received more direct instructions than humans. “But we were surprised to find almost as many emotional statements in the human-robot teams as between humans.” For example: “You’re doing a good job.”

The full study is now freely available online in open access. “I believe research like this is not only interesting for academics, but also for the general public,” says Christina Sanchez-Stockhammer. “But there’s often not much room for explanations in research articles, which makes them harder to follow.” That’s why the linguist provides engaging and accessible explanations of her recent publications in matching episodes of her podcast, “Linguistics Behind the Scenes”. The latest episode focuses on artificial intelligence and the robot study.