Facilitating Continuous Text Messaging in Online Romantic Encounters by Expanded Keywords Enumeration
Taewook Kim, Qingyu Guo, Hyeonjae Kim, Wenjie Yang, Meiziniu Li, Xiaojuan Ma · 2022
An increasing number of people are looking for romantic partners online. Many of them first converse online before deciding whether or not to meet in-person. However, it is often challenging to have smooth and continuous conversations online with someone who they have never met in person. To handle this problem, we built a proof-of-concept system, Tomi, that dynamically suggests various conversation topic seeds related to the latest received messages in real-time. It selects a keyword from an incoming message and returns five contextually relevant topic seeds. In a qualitative study with eight dyads that simulated the common setting of online match-making, users could continue their conversations either by directly or indirectly utilizing the suggested topic seeds. Also, our system boosted their confidence during the chat. Lastly, we analyzed the trade-offs between several design alternatives and presented our reflections on a system supporting continuous conversations with diverse topics.