This paper examines a method to improve the user impression of a spoken dialog system by introducing a mechanism that gradually changes form of utterances every time the user uses the system. In some languages, including Japanese, the form of utterances changes corresponding to social relationship between the talker and the listener. Thus, this mechanism can be effective to express the system's intention to make social distance to the user closer; however, an actual effect of this method is not investigated enough when introduced to the dialog system. In this paper, we conduct dialog experiments and show that controlling the form of system utterances can improve the users' impression. 2 Changing Form of System Utterances Considering Social Distance 2.1 Expressions of Japanese for social distance, politeness and familiarity This study exploits the expressions of Japanese that express politeness and social distance between the talker and the listener. Thus, we first explain such mechanism of Japanese briefly. The Japanese language has a system of speaking form
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