An Attentive Listening System with Android ERICA: Comparison of Autonomous and WOZ Interactions
Koji Inoue, Divesh Lala, Kenta Yamamoto, Shizuka Nakamura, Katsuya Takanashi, Tatsuya Kawahara
Abstract
We describe an attentive listening system for the autonomous android robot ERICA. The proposed system generates several types of listener responses: backchannels, repeats, elaborating questions, assessments, generic sentimental responses, and generic responses. In this paper, we report a subjective experiment with 20 elderly people. First, we evaluated each system utterance excluding backchannels and generic responses, in an offline manner. It was found that most of the system utterances were linguistically appropriate, and they elicited positive reactions from the subjects. Furthermore, 58.2% of the responses were acknowledged as being appropriate listener responses. We also compared the proposed system with a WOZ system where a human operator was operating the robot. From the subjective evaluation, the proposed system achieved comparable scores in basic skills of attentive listening such as encouragement to talk, focused on the talk, and actively listening. It was also found that there is still a gap between the system and the WOZ for more sophisticated skills such as dialogue understanding, showing interest, and empathy towards the user.- Anthology ID:
- 2020.sigdial-1.15
- Volume:
- Proceedings of the 21th Annual Meeting of the Special Interest Group on Discourse and Dialogue
- Month:
- July
- Year:
- 2020
- Address:
- 1st virtual meeting
- Editors:
- Olivier Pietquin, Smaranda Muresan, Vivian Chen, Casey Kennington, David Vandyke, Nina Dethlefs, Koji Inoue, Erik Ekstedt, Stefan Ultes
- Venue:
- SIGDIAL
- SIG:
- SIGDIAL
- Publisher:
- Association for Computational Linguistics
- Note:
- Pages:
- 118–127
- Language:
- URL:
- https://aclanthology.org/2020.sigdial-1.15
- DOI:
- 10.18653/v1/2020.sigdial-1.15
- Cite (ACL):
- Koji Inoue, Divesh Lala, Kenta Yamamoto, Shizuka Nakamura, Katsuya Takanashi, and Tatsuya Kawahara. 2020. An Attentive Listening System with Android ERICA: Comparison of Autonomous and WOZ Interactions. In Proceedings of the 21th Annual Meeting of the Special Interest Group on Discourse and Dialogue, pages 118–127, 1st virtual meeting. Association for Computational Linguistics.
- Cite (Informal):
- An Attentive Listening System with Android ERICA: Comparison of Autonomous and WOZ Interactions (Inoue et al., SIGDIAL 2020)
- PDF:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/improve-issue-templates/2020.sigdial-1.15.pdf