We demonstrate the moderating abilities of a multi-party attentive listening robot system when multiple people are speaking in turns. Our conventional one-on-one attentive listening system generates listener responses such as backchannels, repeats, elaborating questions, and assessments. In this paper, additional robot responses that stimulate a listening user (side participant) to become more involved in the dialogue are proposed. The additional responses elicit assessments and questions from the side participant, making the dialogue more empathetic and lively.

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.