Relation between Degree of Empathy for Narrative Speech and Type of Responsive Utterance in Attentive Listening

Koichiro Ito, Masaki Murata, Tomohiro Ohno, Shigeki Matsubara


Abstract
Nowadays, spoken dialogue agents such as communication robots and smart speakers listen to narratives of humans. In order for such an agent to be recognized as a listener of narratives and convey the attitude of attentive listening, it is necessary to generate responsive utterances. Moreover, responsive utterances can express empathy to narratives and showing an appropriate degree of empathy to narratives is significant for enhancing speaker’s motivation. The degree of empathy shown by responsive utterances is thought to depend on their type. However, the relation between responsive utterances and degrees of the empathy has not been explored yet. This paper describes the classification of responsive utterances based on the degree of empathy in order to explain that relation. In this research, responsive utterances are classified into five levels based on the effect of utterances and literature on attentive listening. Quantitative evaluations using 37,995 responsive utterances showed the appropriateness of the proposed classification.
Anthology ID:
2020.lrec-1.87
Volume:
Proceedings of the Twelfth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference
Month:
May
Year:
2020
Address:
Marseille, France
Venue:
LREC
SIG:
Publisher:
European Language Resources Association
Note:
Pages:
696–701
Language:
English
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.lrec-1.87
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Koichiro Ito, Masaki Murata, Tomohiro Ohno, and Shigeki Matsubara. 2020. Relation between Degree of Empathy for Narrative Speech and Type of Responsive Utterance in Attentive Listening. In Proceedings of the Twelfth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference, pages 696–701, Marseille, France. European Language Resources Association.
Cite (Informal):
Relation between Degree of Empathy for Narrative Speech and Type of Responsive Utterance in Attentive Listening (Ito et al., LREC 2020)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingestion-script-update/2020.lrec-1.87.pdf