Michimasa Inaba

Zhiyang Qi, Takumasa Kaneko, Keiko Takamizo et al.

Generating psychological counseling responses with language models relies heavily on high-quality datasets. Crowdsourced data collection methods require strict worker training, and data from real-world counseling environments may raise privacy and ethical concerns. While recent studies have explored using large language models (LLMs) to augment psychological counseling dialogue datasets, the resulting data often suffers from limited diversity and authenticity. To address these limitations, this study adopts a role-playing approach where trained counselors simulate counselor-client interactions, ensuring high-quality dialogues while mitigating privacy risks. Using this method, we construct KokoroChat, a Japanese psychological counseling dialogue dataset comprising 6,589 long-form dialogues, each accompanied by comprehensive client feedback. Experimental results demonstrate that fine-tuning open-source LLMs with KokoroChat improves both the quality of generated counseling responses and the automatic evaluation of counseling dialogues. The KokoroChat dataset is available at https://github.com/UEC-InabaLab/KokoroChat.

Ryutaro Asahara, Masaki Takahashi, Chiho Iwahashi et al.

Chat dialogues contain considerable useful information about a speaker's interests, preferences, and experiences.Thus, knowledge from open-domain chat dialogue can be used to personalize various systems and offer recommendations for advanced information.This study proposed a novel framework SumRec for recommending information from open-domain chat dialogue.The study also examined the framework using ChatRec, a newly constructed dataset for training and evaluation. To extract the speaker and item characteristics, the SumRec framework employs a large language model (LLM) to generate a summary of the speaker information from a dialogue and to recommend information about an item according to the type of user.The speaker and item information are then input into a score estimation model, generating a recommendation score.Experimental results show that the SumRec framework provides better recommendations than the baseline method of using dialogues and item descriptions in their original form. Our dataset and code is publicly available at https://github.com/Ryutaro-A/SumRec

Yoshiki Tanaka, Ryuichi Uehara, Koji Inoue et al.

Emotion Recognition in Conversation (ERC) is critical for enabling natural human-machine interactions. However, existing methods predominantly employ categorical or dimensional emotion annotations, which often fail to adequately represent complex, subtle, or culturally specific emotional nuances. To overcome this limitation, we propose a novel task named Emotion Transcription in Conversation (ETC). This task focuses on generating natural language descriptions that accurately reflect speakers' emotional states within conversational contexts. To address the ETC, we constructed a Japanese dataset comprising text-based dialogues annotated with participants' self-reported emotional states, described in natural language. The dataset also includes emotion category labels for each transcription, enabling quantitative analysis and its application to ERC. We benchmarked baseline models, finding that while fine-tuning on our dataset enhances model performance, current models still struggle to infer implicit emotional states. The ETC task will encourage further research into more expressive emotion understanding in dialogue. The dataset is publicly available at https://github.com/UEC-InabaLab/ETCDataset.

Zhiyang Qi, Michimasa Inaba

This study addresses the interaction challenges encountered by spoken dialogue systems (SDSs) when engaging with users who exhibit distinct conversational behaviors, particularly minors, in scenarios where data are scarce. We propose a novel data augmentation framework to enhance SDS performance for user groups with limited resources. Our approach leverages a large language model (LLM) to extract speaker styles and a pre-trained language model (PLM) to simulate dialogue act history. This method generates enriched and personalized dialogue data, facilitating improved interactions with unique user demographics. Extensive experiments validate the efficacy of our methodology, highlighting its potential to foster the development of more adaptive and inclusive dialogue systems.

Zhiyang Qi, Keiko Takamizo, Mariko Ukiyo et al.

The rising demand for mental health care has fueled interest in AI-driven counseling systems. While large language models (LLMs) offer significant potential, current approaches face challenges, including limited understanding of clients' psychological states and counseling stages, reliance on high-quality training data, and privacy concerns associated with commercial deployment. To address these issues, we propose EmoStage, a framework that enhances empathetic response generation by leveraging the inference capabilities of open-source LLMs without additional training data. Our framework introduces perspective-taking to infer clients' psychological states and support needs, enabling the generation of emotionally resonant responses. In addition, phase recognition is incorporated to ensure alignment with the counseling process and to prevent contextually inappropriate or inopportune responses. Experiments conducted in both Japanese and Chinese counseling settings demonstrate that EmoStage improves the quality of responses generated by base models and performs competitively with data-driven methods.

Michimasa Inaba, Mariko Ukiyo, Keiko Takamizo

Mental health care poses an increasingly serious challenge to modern societies. In this context, there has been a surge in research that utilizes information technologies to address mental health problems, including those aiming to develop counseling dialogue systems. However, there is a need for more evaluations of the performance of counseling dialogue systems that use large language models. For this study, we collected counseling dialogue data via role-playing scenarios involving expert counselors, and the utterances were annotated with the intentions of the counselors. To determine the feasibility of a dialogue system in real-world counseling scenarios, third-party counselors evaluated the appropriateness of responses from human counselors and those generated by GPT-4 in identical contexts in role-play dialogue data. Analysis of the evaluation results showed that the responses generated by GPT-4 were competitive with those of human counselors.

Hiroki Onozeki, Zhiyang Qi, Kazuma Akiyama et al.

This paper describes our dialogue system submitted to Dialogue Robot Competition 2023. The system's task is to help a user at a travel agency decide on a plan for visiting two sightseeing spots in Kyoto City that satisfy the user. Our dialogue system is flexible and stable and responds to user requirements by controlling dialogue flow according to dialogue scenarios. We also improved user satisfaction by introducing motion and speech control based on system utterances and user situations. In the preliminary round, our system was ranked fifth in the impression evaluation and sixth in the plan evaluation among all 12 teams.

Rikuo Sasaki, Michimasa Inaba

Recent advancements in AI have highlighted its application in captology, the field of using computers as persuasive technologies. We hypothesized that the "conformity effect," where individuals align with others' actions, also occurs with AI agents. This study verifies this hypothesis by introducing a "Persuadee Agent" that is persuaded alongside a human participant in a three-party persuasive dialogue with a Persuader Agent. We conducted a text-based dialogue experiment with human participants. We compared four conditions manipulating the Persuadee Agent's behavior (persuasion acceptance vs. non-acceptance) and the presence of an icebreaker session. Results showed that when the Persuadee Agent accepted persuasion, both perceived persuasiveness and actual attitude change significantly improved. Attitude change was greatest when an icebreaker was also used, whereas an unpersuaded AI agent suppressed attitude change. Additionally, it was confirmed that the persuasion acceptance of participants increased at the moment the Persuadee Agent was persuaded. These results suggest that appropriately designing a Persuadee Agent can improve persuasion through the conformity effect.