Counseling Robot Implementation and Evaluation

• Main Authors: Kurashige, Kentarou, Tsuruta, Setsuo, Sakurai, Eriko, Sakurai, Yoshitaka, Knauf, Rainer, Damiani, Ernesto, Kutics, Andrea
• Format: Conference Proceeding
• Language: English
• Subjects: Counseling; Dialog Promotion; Dictionaries; Employee welfare; Natural languages; Nodding; Ontologies; Reflection; Robot; Robot sensing systems; unazuki
• ISSN: 2577-1655
• DOI: 10.1109/SMC.2018.00297

A lot of IT personnel have psychological distress and counselors to help them are lack in number. Therefore, we proposed a counseling agent (CA) called CRECA (context respectful counseling agent), which listens to clients and promotes their reflection context respectfully namely in a context preserving way. This agent is now enhanced using a body language called "unazuki" in Japanese, a kind of nodding to greatly promote dialogue, often accompanying "un-un" (meaning "exactly") of Japanese onomatopoeia. This body language significantly helps represent empathy or entire approval. Our agent is enhanced with such dialog promotion nodding robot to continue the conversation naturally or context respectfully towards clients' further reflection. To realize it, the robot nods twice at each end of dialog sentence input by clients. Here, we introduce a robot that behaves human-like by an appropriate nodding behavior. The motivation for such a more human-like robot was the extension of application fields from IT workers' counselling to people, who suffer from more social problems such as financial debt, or anxiety of victory or defeat. For such applications, it is important that the agent behaves as much as possible human-like. Here, we present an enhanced experimental evaluation. The quantitative evaluation is based on the utterance amounts of a test group of individuals. These amount with and without the nodding feature are compared. Additionally, the robots with and without nodding are compared