Generating psychological counseling responses with language models relies heavily on high-quality datasets. Crowdsourced data collection methods require strict worker training, and data from real-world counseling environments may raise privacy and ethical concerns. While recent studies have explored using large language models (LLMs) to augment psychological counseling dialogue datasets, the resulting data often suffers from limited diversity and authenticity. To address these limitations, this study adopts a role-playing approach where trained counselors simulate counselor-client interactions, ensuring high-quality dialogues while mitigating privacy risks. Using this method, we construct KokoroChat, a Japanese psychological counseling dialogue dataset comprising 6,589 long-form dialogues, each accompanied by comprehensive client feedback. Experimental results demonstrate that fine-tuning open-source LLMs with KokoroChat improves both the quality of generated counseling responses and the automatic evaluation of counseling dialogues. The KokoroChat dataset is available at https://github.com/UEC-InabaLab/KokoroChat.

A corpus of dialogues between multimodal systems and humans is indispensable for the development and improvement of such systems. However, there is a shortage of human-machine multimodal dialogue datasets, which hinders the widespread deployment of these systems in society. To address this issue, we construct a Japanese multimodal human-machine dialogue corpus, DSLCMM, by collecting and organizing data from the Dialogue System Live Competitions (DSLCs). This paper details the procedure for constructing the corpus and presents our analysis of the relationship between various dialogue features and evaluation scores provided by users.

In human-human conversation, interpersonal consideration for the interlocutor is essential, and similar expectations are increasingly placed on dialogue systems. This study examines the behavior of dialogue systems in a specific interpersonal scenario where a user vents frustrations and seeks emotional support from a long-time friend represented by a dialogue system. We conducted a human evaluation and qualitative analysis of 15 dialogue systems under this setting. These systems implemented diverse strategies, such as structuring dialogue into distinct phases, modeling interpersonal relationships, and incorporating cognitive behavioral therapy techniques. Our analysis reveals that these approaches contributed to improved perceived empathy, coherence, and appropriateness, highlighting the importance of design choices in socially sensitive dialogue.

Challenges in multimodal task-oriented dialogue between humans and systems, particularly those involving audio and visual interactions, have not been sufficiently explored or shared, forcing researchers to define improvement directions individually without a clearly shared roadmap. To address these challenges, we organized a competition for multimodal task-oriented dialogue systems and constructed a large competition-based dataset of 1,865 minutes of Japanese task-oriented dialogues. This dataset includes audio and visual interactions between diverse systems and human participants. After analyzing system behaviors identified as problematic by the human participants in questionnaire surveys and notable methods employed by the participating teams, we identified key challenges in multimodal task-oriented dialogue systems and discussed potential directions for overcoming these challenges.

Recent advancements in natural language processing, particularly with large language models (LLMs) like GPT-4, have significantly enhanced dialogue systems, enabling them to generate more natural and fluent conversations. Despite these improvements, challenges persist, such as managing continuous dialogues, memory retention, and minimizing hallucinations. The AIWolfDial2024 addresses these challenges by employing the Werewolf Game, an incomplete information game, to test the capabilities of LLMs in complex interactive environments. This paper introduces a LLM-based Werewolf Game AI, where each role is supported by situation analysis to aid response generation. Additionally, for the werewolf role, various persuasion strategies, including logical appeal, credibility appeal, and emotional appeal, are employed to effectively persuade other players to align with its actions.

The Werewolf Game is a communication game where players’ reasoning and discussion skills are essential. In this study, we present a Werewolf AI agent developed for the AIWolfDial 2024 shared task, co-hosted with the 17th INLG. In recent years, large language models like ChatGPT have garnered attention for their exceptional response generation and reasoning capabilities. We thus develop the LLM-based agents for the Werewolf Game. This study aims to enhance the consistency of the agent’s utterances by utilizing dialogue summaries generated by LLMs and manually designed personas and utterance examples. By analyzing self-match game logs, we demonstrate that the agent’s utterances are contextually consistent and that the character, including tone, is maintained throughout the game.

This study addresses the interaction challenges encountered by spoken dialogue systems (SDSs) when engaging with users who exhibit distinct conversational behaviors, particularly minors, in scenarios where data are scarce. We propose a novel data augmentation framework to enhance SDS performance for user groups with limited resources. Our approach leverages a large language model (LLM) to extract speaker styles and a pre-trained language model (PLM) to simulate dialogue act history. This method generates enriched and personalized dialogue data, facilitating improved interactions with unique user demographics. Extensive experiments validate the efficacy of our methodology, highlighting its potential to foster the development of more adaptive and inclusive dialogue systems.

Large language models (LLMs), such as GPT-4, have driven significant technological advances in spoken dialogue systems (SDSs). In the era of LLMs, my research focuses on: (1) employing these models for customized dialogue data augmentation to improve SDS adaptability to various speaking styles, and (2) utilizing LLMs to support counselors with psychological counseling dialogues. In the future, I aim to integrate these themes, applying user adaptability to psychological counseling dialogues to facilitate smoother conversations.

We held our 5th annual AIWolf international contest to automatically play the Werewolf game “Mafia”, where players try finding liars via conversations, aiming at promoting developments in creating agents of more natural conversations in higher level, such as longer contexts, personal relationships, semantics, pragmatics, and logics, revealing the capabilities and limits of the generative AIs. In our Natural Language Division of the contest, we had six Japanese speaking agents from five teams, and three English speaking agents, to mutually run games. By using the game logs, We performed human subjective evaluations and detailed log analysis. We found that the entire system performance has largely improved over the previous year, due to the recent advantages of the LLMs. However, it is not perfect at all yet; the generated talks are sometimes inconsistent with the game actions, it is still doubtful that the agents could infer roles by logics rather than superficial utterance generations. It is not explicitly observed in this log but it would be still difficult to make an agent telling a lie, pretend as a villager but it has an opposite goal inside. Our future work includes to reveal the capability of the LLMs, whether they can make the duality of the “liar”, in other words, holding a “true” and a “false” circumstances of the agent at the same time, even holding what these circumstances look like from other agents.