Ana Paula Chaves

Ana Paula Chaves, Marco Aurelio Gerosa

This position paper discusses the relevance of register as a theoretical framework for chatbot language design. We present the concept of register and discuss how using register-specific language influence the user's perceptions of the interaction with chatbots. Additionally, we point several research opportunities that are important to pursue to establish register as a foundation for advancing chatbot's communication skills.

Ana Paula Chaves, Jesse Egbert, Toby Hocking et al.

Chatbots are often designed to mimic social roles attributed to humans. However, little is known about the impact on user's perceptions of using language that fails to conform to the associated social role. Our research draws on sociolinguistic theory to investigate how a chatbot's language choices can adhere to the expected social role the agent performs within a given context. In doing so, we seek to understand whether chatbots design should account for linguistic register. This research analyzes how register differences play a role in shaping the user's perception of the human-chatbot interaction. Ultimately, we want to determine whether register-specific language influences users' perceptions and experiences with chatbots. We produced parallel corpora of conversations in the tourism domain with similar content and varying register characteristics and evaluated users' preferences of chatbot's linguistic choices in terms of appropriateness, credibility, and user experience. Our results show that register characteristics are strong predictors of user's preferences, which points to the needs of designing chatbots with register-appropriate language to improve acceptance and users' perceptions of chatbot interactions.

Ana Paula Chaves, Marco Aurelio Gerosa

Chatbots' growing popularity has brought new challenges to HCI, having changed the patterns of human interactions with computers. The increasing need to approximate conversational interaction styles raises expectations for chatbots to present social behaviors that are habitual in human-human communication. In this survey, we argue that chatbots should be enriched with social characteristics that cohere with users' expectations, ultimately avoiding frustration and dissatisfaction. We bring together the literature on disembodied, text-based chatbots to derive a conceptual model of social characteristics for chatbots. We analyzed 56 papers from various domains to understand how social characteristics can benefit human-chatbot interactions and identify the challenges and strategies to designing them. Additionally, we discussed how characteristics may influence one another. Our results provide relevant opportunities to both researchers and designers to advance human-chatbot interactions.

Eduardo Felipe Zambom Santana, Ana Paula Chaves, Marco Aurelio Gerosa et al.

Making cities smarter help improve city services and increase citizens' quality of life. Information and communication technologies (ICT) are fundamental for progressing towards smarter city environments. Smart City software platforms potentially support the development and integration of Smart City applications. However, the ICT community must overcome current significant technological and scientific challenges before these platforms can be widely used. This paper surveys the state-of-the-art in software platforms for Smart Cities. We analyzed 23 projects with respect to the most used enabling technologies, as well as functional and non-functional requirements, classifying them into four categories: Cyber-Physical Systems, Internet of Things, Big Data, and Cloud Computing. Based on these results, we derived a reference architecture to guide the development of next-generation software platforms for Smart Cities. Finally, we enumerated the most frequently cited open research challenges, and discussed future opportunities. This survey gives important references for helping application developers, city managers, system operators, end-users, and Smart City researchers to make project, investment, and research decisions.