Cultural Communication Idiosyncrasies in Human-Computer Interaction

Abstract

In this work, we investigate whether the cultural idiosyncrasies found in human-human interaction may be transferred to human-computer interaction. With the aim of designing a culture-sensitive dialogue system, we designed a user study creating a dialogue in a domain that has the potential capacity to reveal cultural differences. The dialogue contains different options for the system output according to cultural differences. We conducted a survey among Germans and Japanese to investigate whether the supposed differences may be applied in human-computer interaction. Our results show that there are indeed differences, but not all results are consistent with the cultural models.