Multi-step or Direct: A Proactive Home-Assistant System Based on Commonsense Reasoning

Konosuke Yamasaki, Shohei Tanaka, Akishige Yuguchi, Seiya Kawano, Koichiro Yoshino


Abstract
There is a growing expectation for the realization of proactive home-assistant robots that can assist users in their daily lives. It is essential to develop a framework that closely observes the user’s surrounding context, selectively extracts relevant information, and infers the user’s needs to proactively propose appropriate assistance. In this study, we first extend the Do-I-Demand dataset to define expected proactive assistance actions in domestic situations, where users make ambiguous utterances. These behaviors were defined based on common patterns of support that a majority of users would expect from a robot. We subsequently constructed a framework that infers users’ expected assistance actions from ambiguous utterances through commonsense reasoning. We explored two approaches: (1) multi-step reasoning using COMET as a commonsense reasoning engine, and (2) direct reasoning using large language models. Our experimental results suggest that both the multi-step and direct reasoning methods can successfully derive necessary assistance actions even when dealing with ambiguous user utterances.
Anthology ID:
2025.sigdial-1.45
Volume:
Proceedings of the 26th Annual Meeting of the Special Interest Group on Discourse and Dialogue
Month:
August
Year:
2025
Address:
Avignon, France
Editors:
Frédéric Béchet, Fabrice Lefèvre, Nicholas Asher, Seokhwan Kim, Teva Merlin
Venue:
SIGDIAL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
561–572
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2025.sigdial-1.45/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Konosuke Yamasaki, Shohei Tanaka, Akishige Yuguchi, Seiya Kawano, and Koichiro Yoshino. 2025. Multi-step or Direct: A Proactive Home-Assistant System Based on Commonsense Reasoning. In Proceedings of the 26th Annual Meeting of the Special Interest Group on Discourse and Dialogue, pages 561–572, Avignon, France. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Multi-step or Direct: A Proactive Home-Assistant System Based on Commonsense Reasoning (Yamasaki et al., SIGDIAL 2025)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2025.sigdial-1.45.pdf