A Generation Method of Back-Channel Response to Let a Chatting Bot Be a Member of Discussions in a Text-Based Chat
Yoko Nishihara, Masaki Ikuta, Ryosuke Yamanishi, Junichi Fukumoto · 2017
This paper proposes a method to generate backchannel responses of a chatting bot in a text-based chat. We have been studied methods of activating text-based discussions. In our previous work, we have proposed a method to post questions by a chatting bot to activate discussions. Posting questions by the chatting bot could obtain answers from discussion participants. Some of the answers contributed to increasing the number of topics in discussions. However, all questions are not answered carefully by the discussion participants. Some of the questions are passed through by the discussion participants. Careful answering is required to activate text-based discussions. We thought that the discussion participants did not recognize the chatting bot as a member of a discussion because the chatting bot posted only questions. The chatting bot seemed not to listen to the others comments.Therefore, the discussion participants did not answer all questions carefully. We suppose that the chatting bot is recognized as a member of a discussion and questions of the chatting bot are answered carefully by discussion participants if the chatting bot posts back-channel responses to the others comments. The chatting bot posts back-channel responses with three satisfied conditions that have been obtained from preliminary experiments. In evaluation experiments, we compared the chatting bot of the proposed method with a chatting bot that gives only questions. We evaluated the efficiency of the two chatting bots for activating text-based discussions. We evaluated the degree of activation of a discussion using the number of topics obtained in the discussion and the rate of carefully answered questions. When using the proposed chatting bot, both the number and the rate were higher than those of the comparative chatting bot. The results indicate that discussions are more activated by posting both questions and back-channel responses by the chatting bot. The three types of back-channel response were posted appropriately instead of a condition: when a comment with a question mark is posted, the chatting bot posts a back-channel response as representing an agreement with the posted comment.