Can a humanoid robot be part of the organizational workforce? A user study leveraging sentiment analysis

Abstract

Hiring robots for the workplaces is a challenging task as robots have to cater to customer demands, follow organizational protocols and behave with social etiquette. In this study, we propose to have a humanoid social robot, Nadine, as a customer service agent in an open social work environment. The objective of this study is to analyze the effects of humanoid robots on customers in a work environment, and see if it can handle social scenarios. We propose to evaluate these objectives through two modes, namely: survey questionnaire and customer feedback. The survey questionnaires are analyzed based on the datapoints provided in the questionnaire. We propose a novel approach to analyze customer feedback data using sentic computing. Specifically, we employ aspect extraction and sentiment analysis to analyze the data. From our framework, we detect sentiment associated to the aspects that mainly concerned the customers during their interaction. This allows us to understand customers expectations and current limitations of robots as employees.