ERICA: An Empathetic Android Companion for Covid-19 Quarantine
Etsuko Ishii, Genta Indra Winata, Samuel Cahyawijaya, Divesh Lala, Tatsuya Kawahara, Pascale Fung
Abstract
Over the past year, research in various domains, including Natural Language Processing (NLP), has been accelerated to fight against the COVID-19 pandemic, yet such research has just started on dialogue systems. In this paper, we introduce an end-to-end dialogue system which aims to ease the isolation of people under self-quarantine. We conduct a control simulation experiment to assess the effects of the user interface: a web-based virtual agent, Nora vs. the android ERICA via a video call. The experimental results show that the android can offer a more valuable user experience by giving the impression of being more empathetic and engaging in the conversation due to its nonverbal information, such as facial expressions and body gestures.- Anthology ID:
- 2021.sigdial-1.27
- Volume:
- Proceedings of the 22nd Annual Meeting of the Special Interest Group on Discourse and Dialogue
- Month:
- July
- Year:
- 2021
- Address:
- Singapore and Online
- Venue:
- SIGDIAL
- SIG:
- SIGDIAL
- Publisher:
- Association for Computational Linguistics
- Note:
- Pages:
- 257–260
- Language:
- URL:
- https://aclanthology.org/2021.sigdial-1.27
- DOI:
- Cite (ACL):
- Etsuko Ishii, Genta Indra Winata, Samuel Cahyawijaya, Divesh Lala, Tatsuya Kawahara, and Pascale Fung. 2021. ERICA: An Empathetic Android Companion for Covid-19 Quarantine. In Proceedings of the 22nd Annual Meeting of the Special Interest Group on Discourse and Dialogue, pages 257–260, Singapore and Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.
- Cite (Informal):
- ERICA: An Empathetic Android Companion for Covid-19 Quarantine (Ishii et al., SIGDIAL 2021)
- PDF:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingestion-script-update/2021.sigdial-1.27.pdf