Category: Publication

2023, Project, Publication

Design and Implementation of a Dialogue Breakdown Avoidance Method Using Excuses in a Chat Dialogue System

対話システムとの自然な対話を実現するには,対話破綻を解消する必要がある.しかし,対話破綻を検出する研究は多く行われており,手法も確立されている一方で,対話破綻検出を行った後,どのように対話破綻を回避するのかという対話破綻回避をテーマとして扱った研究は,相対的に見て数が少なく,明確な手法も確立されていない.そこで,本研究ではこの対話破綻を,システムが言い訳を返すことで回避する手法を提案する.言い訳は主に自分の失敗・過失に対する弁明・謝罪と定義されている.これを対話システムに置き換えると,対話破綻をシステム視点での失敗・過失として解釈できる.以上の経緯から,ユーザーに好印象を与える言い訳応答を返すことで対話破綻回避を行うモジュールを作成し,対話システムへの実装を行った.また,システムの実運用を想定とした主観視点の印象評価実験と,対話内容の定性的な評価を行う客観視点の印象評価実験の2種類の実験を実施し,提案手法の有効性を示した.

2022, Project, Publication

Analysis of the Effect of Modality and Social Relationships on Building Common Ground , Yuki Furuya, Koki Saito,Kosuke Ogura ( Keio Univ.),Koh Mitsuda,Ryuichiro Higashinaka (NTT),Kazunori Takashio ( Keio Univ.)

Building common ground with users is essential for dialogue agent systems and robots to interact naturally with people. While a few previous studies have investigated the process of building common ground in human-human dialogue, most of them have been conducted on the basis of text chat. In this study, we constructed a dialogue corpus to investigate the process of building common ground with a particular focus on the modality of dialogue and the social relationship between the participants in the process of building common ground, which are important but have not been investigated in the previous work. The results of our analysis suggest that adding the modality or developing the relationship between workers speeds up the building of common ground. Specifically, regarding the modality, the presence of video rather than only audio may unconsciously facilitate work, and as for the relationship, it is easier to convey information about emotions and turn-taking among friends than in first meetings. These findings and the corpus should prove useful for developing a system to support remote communication.

2022, Project, Publication

Dialogue Corpus Construction Considering Modality and Social Relationships in Building Common Ground. Yuki Furuya, Koki Saito, Kosuke Ogura, Koh Mitsuda, Ryuichiro Higashinaka, and Kazunori Takashio. 2022.In Proceedings of the Thirteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference, pages 4088–4095, Marseille, France. European Language Resources Association.

Building common ground with users is essential for dialogue agent systems and robots to interact naturally with people. While a few previous studies have investigated the process of building common ground in human-human dialogue, most of them have been conducted on the basis of text chat. In this study, we constructed a dialogue corpus to investigate the process of building common ground with a particular focus on the modality of dialogue and the social relationship between the participants in the process of building common ground, which are important but have not been investigated in the previous work. The results of our analysis suggest that adding the modality or developing the relationship between workers speeds up the building of common ground. Specifically, regarding the modality, the presence of video rather than only audio may unconsciously facilitate work, and as for the relationship, it is easier to convey information about emotions and turn-taking among friends than in first meetings. These findings and the corpus should prove useful for developing a system to support remote communication.

2022, Publication

An implementation of creating human presence of AR navigation system, Ryoma Ariyoshi, Kentaro Taninaka, Kazunori Takashio, IEICE Tech. Rep., vol. 122, no. 193, CNR2022-12, pp. 23-28, September 2022.

In the field of AR, smartphones are often used for navigation, but since the hands are occupied and the immersive experience is compromised, it is preferable to use a stand-alone HMD for AR. However, AR navigation using HMDs is easily affected by the external environment, which inhibits immersion and realism. In addition, the only way to know the traces of a person who was there in the past is to view two-dimensional content, which does not provide a sense of presence or realism. In this research, we aim to implement an AR navigation system that enables interaction with avatars by eliminating factors that impair the sense of presence and realism. As a preliminary step, we investigated how to display avatars with a sense of presence, using HoloLens 2, and experimented with three levels of abstraction, each with motion, superimposed on the Keio University Shonan Fujisawa Campus. The results suggest that the avatar with the lowest level of abstraction and the appearance closest to that of a human being has a greater presence on certain questions. We also observed the “uncanny valley phenomenon,” in which people feel fear and discomfort toward the Avatar when its appearance is closer to reality.

2021, Publication

An Analysis of Acceptance Factors of Partner Robot -What is “Animal-Like”- , Koki Saito, Furuya Yuki, Kazunori Takashio, IEICE Tech. Rep., vol. 121, no. 267, CNR2021-9, pp. 11-15, Nov. 2021.

In this study, we analyzed what kind of animal-like qualities are important in the acceptance of partner robots in households. The questionnaire surveyed the animal-like qualities of visual, auditory and tactile elements, and analyzed the relation between the partial animal-like qualities of each element and the duration of use. We also showed what aspects of the robot’s animal-like nature the user perceived by analyzing the relationship between the animal-like nature of each element of the robot and the sense of living things.
The results suggest that items such as the intelligence of the robot and the animal-like shape of the robot might be factors in acceptance. It was also suggested that the smoothness of the robot’s movement and the animal-like sound of the volume other than the robot’s voice were factors that made users feel a sense of living-likeness toward the robot.

2021, Publication

A Feasibility Study of An Intelligent Environmental Monitoring System Based On The Ethereum Blockchains, Cheng Yiyang, Kazunori Takashio, 2021 International Conference on Information and Communication Technology Convergence (ICTC 2021), pp. 435-439, doi: 10.1109/ICTC52510.2021.9621007.

In today’s era, the security and authenticity of information have always received extensive attention, especially when people have doubts about the authenticity of data. Hence, a traceable data storage platform with the feature that theoretically cannot be tampered with becomes extremely important. Under such demands, the deployment of smart contracts can effectively trace the source and discover problems. This article introduces an environmental data detection platform based on blockchain technology and smart contracts. It aims to record the data continuously and verify the authority of each transaction.