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Automated Social Skills Trainer

Published: 18 March 2015 Publication History

Abstract

Social skills training is a well-established method to decrease human anxiety and discomfort in social interaction, and acquire social skills. In this paper, we attempt to automate the process of social skills training by developing a dialogue system named "automated social skills trainer," which provides social skills training through human-computer interaction. The system includes a virtual avatar that recognizes user speech and language information and gives feedback to users to improve their social skills. Its design is based on conventional social skills training performed by human participants, including defining target skills, modeling, role-play, feedback, reinforcement, and homework. An experimental evaluation measuring the relationship between social skill and speech and language features shows that these features have a relationship with autistic traits. Additional experiments measuring the effect of performing social skills training with the proposed application show that most participants improve their skill by using the system for 50 minutes.

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cover image ACM Conferences
IUI '15: Proceedings of the 20th International Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces
March 2015
480 pages
ISBN:9781450333061
DOI:10.1145/2678025
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Publication History

Published: 18 March 2015

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Author Tags

  1. behavior detection
  2. computer-based training
  3. dialogue system
  4. embodied conversational avatar
  5. social skills training (sst)

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  • Research-article

Funding Sources

  • Foundation for Nara Institute of Science and Technology
  • JSPS KAKEN

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IUI'15
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IUI '15 Paper Acceptance Rate 47 of 205 submissions, 23%;
Overall Acceptance Rate 746 of 2,811 submissions, 27%

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IUI '25

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  • (2024)On the potential of supporting autonomy in online video interview training platformsInternational Journal of Human-Computer Studies10.1016/j.ijhcs.2024.103326191:COnline publication date: 1-Nov-2024
  • (2023)Analysis of the Effects of Assertive Feedback from a Job Interview Training AgentProceedings of the 11th International Conference on Human-Agent Interaction10.1145/3623809.3623933(384-386)Online publication date: 4-Dec-2023
  • (2023)Multimodal Transfer Learning for Oral Presentation AssessmentIEEE Access10.1109/ACCESS.2023.329583211(84013-84026)Online publication date: 2023
  • (2023)Chatbots and Children with Special Educational Needs InteractionUniversal Access in Human-Computer Interaction10.1007/978-3-031-35897-5_32(443-452)Online publication date: 9-Jul-2023
  • (2022)Multimodal Analysis for Communication Skill and Self-Efficacy Level Estimation in Job Interview ScenarioProceedings of the 21st International Conference on Mobile and Ubiquitous Multimedia10.1145/3568444.3568461(110-120)Online publication date: 27-Nov-2022
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  • (2022)Development of a Web-Based Interview Support System Using Characters Nodding with Various MovementsHCI International 2022 - Late Breaking Papers. Multimodality in Advanced Interaction Environments10.1007/978-3-031-17618-0_7(76-87)Online publication date: 2-Oct-2022
  • (2021)Perceptions and Opinions of Patients About Mental Health Chatbots: Scoping ReviewJournal of Medical Internet Research10.2196/1782823:1(e17828)Online publication date: 13-Jan-2021
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