Abstract: The advances in social robotics have extended the possibilities of their use in different applications and have also increased the sectors of users to which those applications can benefit. An attractive population of users is children. Recently, there has been a trend towards research in the design of interactive systems for children, as well as in the study of modeling the interaction between children and this type of systems. In this work, we present a study carried out with the objective of analyzing the affective response of children when interacting with a robot using speech-based communication. We collected data through an experiment using a Wizard of Oz scenario where we induced different affective reactions in the participants. Two type of data were collected and analyzed: 1) a set of evaluators manually created annotations of emotions and attitudes to determine the distribution of emotions during the experiments and evaluate how difficult is the training of automatic classifiers to discriminate different affective states from the acoustic properties of the children’s voices; 2) we used the children’s responses from a self-evaluation questionnaire about their perceptions and preferences towards the robots, modeled with different personalities, to assess whether there are relevant differences according to their different age’s range. We obtained a large children’s speech database that would be a valuable resource for the study of paralinguistic and interaction aspects. Despite the imbalance of the database, we were able to obtain good results for the classification of emotions and attitudes. We also find some relevant differences in how young and older children note the differences in the behaviors of the robots according to the modeled personality. Differences based on children’s age were also found in the preferences towards the two different robots.
Keywords: Children speech analysis, paralinguistic information, emotion recognition, social robots
