Selecting Popular Topics for Elderly People in Conversation-based Companion Agents
Kazufumi Tsukada, Yutaka Takase, Yukiko Nakano · 2015
In aging societies, supporting elderly people is a critical issue, and companion agents that can function as a conversational partner are expected to provide social support to isolated older adults. Aiming at improving companionship dialogues with these agents, this study proposes a topic selection mechanism using blog articles written by the elderly. By categorizing the nouns extracted from blogs using Wikipedia, we defined 219 topic categories consisting of about 3,000 topic words that the elderly discuss in their daily life. The topic selection mechanism is implemented into a companion agent and used to generate the agent's utterances.