Engagement in Human-Agent Interaction: An Overview

Abstract

Engagement is a concept of the utmost importance in human-computer interaction, not only for informing the design and implementation of interfaces, but also for enabling more sophisticated interfaces capable of adapting to users. While the notion of engagement is actively being studied in a diverse set of domains, the term has been used to refer to a number of related, but different concepts. In fact it has been referred to across different disciplines under different names and with different connotations in mind. Therefore, it can be quite difficult to understand what the meaning of engagement is and how one study relates to another one accordingly. Engagement has been studied not only in human-human, but also in human-agent interactions i.e., interactions with physical robots and embodied virtual agents. In this overview article we focus on different factors involved in engagement studies, distinguishing especially between those studies that address task and social engagement, involve children and adults, are conducted in a lab or aimed for long term interaction. We also present models for detecting engagement and for generating multimodal behaviors to show engagement.

Semi-autonomous avatar enabling unconstrained parallel conversations –seamless hybrid of WOZ and autonomous dialogue systems–

“…Even if the responses by the system are correct, the user may experience boredom or disinterest in the conversation for whatever reason. This situation manifests itself at the engagement level and behaviors and utterance patterns may indicate this internal state [13]. Our system measures the engagement of the user by considering both the user and system utterances.…”

What if Social Robots Look for Productive Engagement?

“…Engagement is a concept widely investigated in humanrobot interaction (HRI) and yet still elusive [52]. Commonly adopted definitions include the one of Sidner et al [68], defining engagement as "the process by which two (or more) participants establish, maintain and end their perceived connection during interactions they jointly undertake", or the one of Poggi et al [58], defining engagement as "the value Fig.…”

Age-related changes in gaze behaviour during social interaction: An eye-tracking study with an embodied conversational agent

“…Older users are generally disposed to interact with virtual agents (Sin & Munteanu, 2020) and perceive them as trustworthy (Hosseinpanah et al, 2018). Thus, virtual agents have shown the potential for studying social-emotional behaviour (Cohen et al, 2017;Dautenhahn, 2007) in interactive and socially engaging paradigms (Oertel et al, 2020) while enabling experimental control and reproducibility (Oker et al, 2018;Wykowska et al, 2016). Studies in cognitive and educational psychology have investigated the effects of virtual conversation on the impressions, understanding and learning gains of adult or child users (Cassell et al, 2000), but to date no studies have examined to what extent young and older adults' spontaneous gaze behaviour differs when interacting with a virtual agent.…”