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Can a Virtual Listener Replace a Human Listener in Active Listening Conversation?

Published: 13 November 2015 Publication History

Abstract

The elderly who live alone are increasing rapidly in these years. For their mental health, it is reported useful to maintain their social life with others. Active listening is a communication technique that the listener listens to the speaker carefully and attentively by confirming or asking for more details about what they heard. Our project is aiming to develop a computer graphics animated agent who can engage active listening dialog with the elderly users. However, there is a research issue exists in this task: whether the CG animated virtual listener can be really perceived as a human active listeners even if they perform the same behaviors. This paper presents the experiment results in investigating this issue. We conducted an experiment which collects active listening teleconferences in two conditions, human-human and human-agent. In the human-agent condition, the human listener's video is substituted with a CG character performing the same behaviors. We then compared the impression in these two conditions base on the evaluation done by the participants themselves. The results showed that generally there were no significant differences between these two conditions. This means that a virtual listener can engage active listening at the level similar to human listeners if their behaviors are appropriately modeled.

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  1. Can a Virtual Listener Replace a Human Listener in Active Listening Conversation?

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    cover image ACM Conferences
    ERM4CT '15: Proceedings of the International Workshop on Emotion Representations and Modelling for Companion Technologies
    November 2015
    46 pages
    ISBN:9781450339889
    DOI:10.1145/2829966
    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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    Published: 13 November 2015

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    Author Tags

    1. elderly care
    2. embodied conversational agents

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    ICMI '15: INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON MULTIMODAL INTERACTION
    November 13, 2015
    Washington, Seattle, USA

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    • (2023)Integrating Real-Time Health Status into Everyday Objects: A Design Case Study on Enhancing Diabetic Health Monitoring with Artistic CreationsProceedings of the 25th International Conference on Mobile Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/3565066.3608696(1-6)Online publication date: 26-Sep-2023
    • (2021)Discussion of Intelligent Electric Wheelchairs for Caregivers and Care RecipientsHCI in Mobility, Transport, and Automotive Systems10.1007/978-3-030-78358-7_35(500-516)Online publication date: 3-Jul-2021
    • (2018)A Systematic Literature Review on Devices and Systems for Ambient Assisted Living: Solutions and Trends from Different User Perspectives2018 International Conference on eDemocracy & eGovernment (ICEDEG)10.1109/ICEDEG.2018.8372367(59-66)Online publication date: Apr-2018

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