The good, the bad and the neutral: Affective profile in dialog system-user communication

Abstract

We describe the use of affective profiles in a dialog system and its effect on participants' perception of conversational partners and experienced emotional changes in an experimental setting, as well as the mechanisms for realising three different affective profiles and for steering task-oriented follow-up dialogs. Experimental results show that the system's affective profile determines the rating of chatting enjoyment and user-system emotional connection to a large extent. Self-reported emotional changes experienced by participants during an interaction with the system are also strongly correlated with the type of applied profile. Perception of core capabilities of the system, realism and coherence of dialog, are only influenced to a limited extent. © 2011 Springer-Verlag.