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Analysing user’s reactions in advice-giving dialogues with a socially intelligent ECA

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Abstract

In this paper, we investigate the user’s reactions to received suggestion by an Embodied Conversational Agent playing the role of artificial therapist in the healthy eating domain. Specifically, we analyse the behaviour of people who voluntarily requested to receive information from the agent, and we compare it with the results of a previous evaluation experiment in which subjects were not properly motivated to interact with the agent because they were selected for evaluating the system. This study is part of an ongoing research aimed at developing an intelligent virtual agent that applies natural argumentation techniques to persuade the users to improve their eating habits.

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Acknowledgments

We want to acknowledge Enrica Pesare for her cooperation in collecting and analysing the data and the ‘Body Energy’ fitness centre in Mola di Bari (IT) for kindly enabling us to perform the new WoZ experiments.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Intelligent Interfaces, Department of Informatics, University of Bari, Via Orabona 4, 70126, Bari, Italy

    Nicole Novielli, Irene Mazzotta, Berardina De Carolis & Sebastiano Pizzutilo

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  1. Nicole Novielli
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  2. Irene Mazzotta
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  3. Berardina De Carolis
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  4. Sebastiano Pizzutilo
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Nicole Novielli.

Additional information

This article is part of the Supplement Issue on “Social Signals. From Theory to Applications,” guest-edited by Isabella Poggi, Francesca D’Errico, and Alessandro Vinciarelli.

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Novielli, N., Mazzotta, I., De Carolis, B. et al. Analysing user’s reactions in advice-giving dialogues with a socially intelligent ECA. Cogn Process 13 (Suppl 2), 487–497 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10339-011-0420-1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10339-011-0420-1

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