Dialogue Design and Management for Multi-Session Casual Conversation with Older Adults
This addresses the problem of loneliness and social anxiety in older adults by providing a practice tool, but it is incremental as it builds on existing dialogue management techniques.
The paper tackled the problem of designing a conversational avatar for multi-session casual conversations with older adults, and the result showed that the automatic dialogue manager handled conversations smoothly and naturally, as judged by research assistants based on criteria like naturalness and relevance.
We address the problem of designing a conversational avatar capable of a sequence of casual conversations with older adults. Users at risk of loneliness, social anxiety or a sense of ennui may benefit from practicing such conversations in private, at their convenience. We describe an automatic spoken dialogue manager for LISSA, an on-screen virtual agent that can keep older users involved in conversations over several sessions, each lasting 10-20 minutes. The idea behind LISSA is to improve users' communication skills by providing feedback on their non-verbal behavior at certain points in the course of the conversations. In this paper, we analyze the dialogues collected from the first session between LISSA and each of 8 participants. We examine the quality of the conversations by comparing the transcripts with those collected in a WOZ setting. LISSA's contributions to the conversations were judged by research assistants who rated the extent to which the contributions were "natural", "on track", "encouraging", "understanding", "relevant", and "polite". The results show that the automatic dialogue manager was able to handle conversation with the users smoothly and naturally.