Effects of robots’ appearance on guest service experiences

ABSTRACT

Robots are starting to replace human employees in the accommodation industry. It remains unclear how guests perceive robots. The study aims to evaluate the effectiveness of the humanoid and non-humanoid robots and to compare the guests’ perceptions. The data was collected by web digging and analyzed using text mining and machine learning. The results show that guests experience more positive emotions in non-humanoid robotic experiences. They also stated that they found both types of robot fun and interesting. However, guests have negative perceptions about the perceived usefulness and appearance of humanoid robots. According to the findings of the machine learning analysis, the neural network and logistic regression models show the best statistical performance in both datasets compared to other machine learning models. The study contributes to the literature through an investigation of guests’ opinions regarding robot types with the use of machine learning and text mining methods.

摘要

在住宿行业, 机器人开始取代人类员工. 目前尚不清楚客人是如何看待机器人的. 该研究旨在评估人形机器人和非人形机器人的有效性, 并比较客人的感知. 数据是通过网络挖掘收集的, 并使用文本挖掘和机器学习进行分析. 研究结果表明, 在非人形机器人的体验中, 客人会体验到更多积极的情绪. 他们还表示, 他们发现这两种类型的机器人都很有趣. 然而, 客人对人形机器人的实用性和外观有负面看法. 根据机器学习分析的结果, 与其他机器学习模型相比, 神经网络和逻辑回归模型在两个数据集中都显示出最佳的统计性能. 该研究通过使用机器学习和文本挖掘方法调查客人对机器人类型的看法, 为文献做出了贡献.

KEYWORDS:

• Humanoid robot
• dinosaur robot
• accommodation industry
• natural language processing
• machine learning
• text mining

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).