Information-gathering dialog system using acoustic features and user’s motivation

Abstract

Recently, as society continues to age, automation of watching elderly people who live apart from their families has been gradually expected. However, we must prevent them from losing their purpose in life, which declines due to lack of communication. Thus, a chat dialog system has attracted widespread attention as a method that achieves both problems: keeping their purpose in life and watching their daily lives. Unlike a task-oriented dialog system, a chat dialog system has explicitly no task to accomplish and makes a conversation to continue communication with the users. Keeping a conversation is essential for elderly people who are mostly unfamiliar with digital devices. Moreover, conversing daily on the chat dialog system provides the opportunity to collect information for their care. This study realizes an information-gathering dialog system, a chat dialog system that collects healthcare information of elderly people. Furthermore, we use the nonverbal acoustic features from their speech, since automatic speech recognition is not necessarily accurate in current systems. This paper illustrates the effectiveness of two important elements, topic change for keeping the talking user motivated with the dialog system and motivation estimation, for attaining an information-gathering dialog system using nonverbal acoustic features.