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Designing conversational agents: effect of conversational form on our comprehension
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Original Article
Designing conversational agents: effect of conversational form on our comprehension
Koji Yamashita1 , 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
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