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Original Article

Designing conversational agents: effect of conversational form on our comprehension

Koji YamashitaContact Information, Hidekazu Kubota2 and Toyoaki Nishida2

(1)  Keihanna Human Info-Communication Research Center, National Institute of Information and Communications Technology, 3-5 Hikaridai, Seika, Soraku, 619-0289, Kyoto,  , Japan
(2)  Graduate School of Informatics, Kyoto University, Yoshida-Honmachi, 606-8501 Sakyo-ku, Kyoto, Japan

Received: 1 December 2004  Accepted: 2 June 2005  Published online: 23 August 2005

Abstract  We have developed a broadcasting agent system, public opinion channel (POC) caster, which generates understandable conversational form from text-based documents. The POC caster circulates the opinions of community members by using conversational form in a broadcasting system on the Internet. We evaluated its transformation rules in two experiments. In experiment 1, we examined our transformation rules for conversational form in relation to sentence length. Twenty-four participants listened to two types of sentence (long sentences and short sentences) with conversational form or with single speech. In experiment 2, we investigated the relationship between conversational form and the user’s knowledge level. Forty-two participants (21 with a high knowledge level and 21 with a low knowledge level) were selected for a knowledge task and listened to two kinds of sentence (sentences about a well-known topic or sentences about an unfamiliar topic). Our results indicate that the conversational form aided comprehension, especially for long sentences and when users had little knowledge about the topic. We explore possible explanations and implications of these results with regard to human cognition and text comprehension.

Keywords  Agents - Information providing - Conversational form - Comprehension - Evaluative study


Contact Information Koji Yamashita
Email: koji@nict.go.jp
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