Journal
PROCEEDINGS OF THE 2020 ACM/IEEE INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON HUMAN-ROBOT INTERACTION (HRI '20)
Volume -, Issue -, Pages 589-597Publisher
ASSOC COMPUTING MACHINERY
DOI: 10.1145/3319502.3374794
Keywords
social media; robots; death; social robots; anthropomorphism
Funding
- NSF [SES 1734456]
- NIDILRR [90DPGE0003]
- NASA [80NSSC19K1133]
- NIDILRR [90DPGE0003, 1004314] Funding Source: Federal RePORTER
Ask authors/readers for more resources
People take to social media to share their thoughts, joys, and sorrows. A recent popular trend has been to support and mourn people and pets that have died as well as other objects that have sufered catastrophic damage. As several popular robots have been discontinued, including the Opportunity Rover, Jibo, and Kuri, we are interested in how language used to mourn these robots compares to that to mourn people, animals, and other objects. We performed a study in which we asked participants to categorize deidentifed Twitter reactions as referencing the death of a person, an animal, a robot, or another object. Most reactions were labeled as being about humans, which suggests that people use similar language to describe feelings for animate and inanimate entities. We used a natural language toolkit to analyze language from a larger set of tweets. A majority of tweets about Opportunity included second-person (you) and gendered third-person pronouns (she/he versus it), but terms like R.I.P were reserved almost exclusively for humans and animals. Our fndings suggest that people verbally mourn robots similarly to living things, but reserve some language for people.
Authors
I am an author on this paper
Click your name to claim this paper and add it to your profile.
Reviews
Recommended
No Data Available