Self-Talk: Responses to Users' Opinions and Challenges in Human Computer Dialog

摘要

People like to be, or partly, encouraged when their opinions or challenges are supported by listeners, even the listeners are robots. Encouraging responses from the robot which seem to get users' points potentially improve users' feeling in human computer dialog. According to this hypothesis, this paper proposes a method to generate supporting responses to users' opinions or challenges. The core ideas and contributions of the proposed method are: (1) multiple search engines cooperate, and (2) each engine random asks itself or ask another one to obtain more related information from the internet in multiple turns; then (3) final responses are abstracted from the answers. We call these three steps as Self-Talk. The comparisons between Self-Talk and several commercial open speech assistants show that the proposed method does generate suitable answers to users when they present their opinions or challenges in dialog. The hypothesis is positively evaluated that encouraging responses could improve users' chat feeling.