Improving User Impression in Spoken Dialog System with Gradual Speech Form Control

Abstract

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

Lexical Acquisition during Dialogues through Implicit Confirmation

“…This situation differs from task-oriented dialogues, in which user satisfaction depends on the task success and dialogue cost Walker et al (1997). Kageyama et al (2018) investigated whether gradually controlling the form of a system's utterances can improve users' impression.…”

SMOC corpus: A large-scale Japanese spontaneous multimodal one-on-one chat-talk corpus for dialog systems

“…We recorded the two speakers' speech sounds so that one speaker's speech was recorded in one channel, and the visual data of speakers was captured from the front. The recorded dialog data were annotated with subjective closeness labels that can be used to studies of the non-task-oriented dialog systems [5]. In this paper, we describe a concrete procedure of the data collection.…”