Toward Robotic Socially Believable Behaving Systems - Volume II by Anna Esposito & Lakhmi C. Jain

Author:Anna Esposito & Lakhmi C. Jain
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Springer International Publishing, Cham

7.2.3 Socio-Emotional Interaction Strategies

In addition to the requirement of taking into account user socio-emotional behavior, on the one hand and to generate believable and engaging socio-emotional behavior of the agent, on the other hand, HCI requires to define the socio-emotional strategies linking the user input to the agent output. Existing strategies do not always have the explicit goal of fostering user engagement. In this paragraph, we focus on examples of strategies that have been explicitly used to foster user’s engagement or to improve feelings of rapport, a concept which is strongly linked to engagement [14].

Providing backchannels and feedbacks is a key strategy for maintaining user engagement by providing agent’s listening behaviors [73]. Thus, in the study of D’Mello and Graesser [45], the Auto-tutor agent provided feedback in order to help students to regulate their disengagement (boredom, etc.). In [122], the agent was able to generate multimodal backchannel (smile, nod, and verbal content) when it is listening to the user, and the timing of the backchannel—that is when to trigger the backchannel—was provided by probabilistic rules. In [135], they provided another rule-based model in order to predict when a backchannel has to be triggered as a reaction to prosody and pause behaviors. In [86] they used sequential probabilistic models, an interesting method to predict jointly when and how to generate backchannels in the listening phase of the agent. The timing issue of backchannel is close to the issue tackled in turn-taking strategies, that is, when the agent has to take or give the floor. As described in Sect. 7.2.5, researchers presented different turn-taking strategies and evaluated their role on the user’s impressions [79, 80].

Politeness strategies are also associated with the concept of engagement. They provide to the agent a social intelligence [139] and allow it to be perceived as more engaged in the interaction [57]. In [4], politeness strategies were used as an answer to the expression of negative emotional states by the user to adjust the politeness level of their virtual guide. The more the interlocutor is in a negative emotional state, the more the guide has to be polite. However, Campano et al. [28] showed that in certain situations such as in video games, the agent has to express impoliteness to be more believable.

Endowing agents with humor may be a smart answer when the user is confused in front of some dysfunctions of the interaction system. Dybala and colleagues [47] proposed a humor-equipped casual conversational system (chatbot) and demonstrated that it enhances the user’s positive engagement/involvement in the conversation.

A last example of smart strategies dedicated to improve user engagement is the management of agent’s surprise. Bohus and Horvitz [17] proposed to communicate the robot’s surprise when the user seemed to be disengaged in the interaction by using linguistic hesitation.

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