Analysing user's reactions in advice-giving dialogues with a socially intelligent eca

Nicole Novielli

Irene Mazzotta

Berardina De Carolis

Sebastiano Pizzutilo

pp. 487-497

in: Cognitive Processing 13, 2012.

Abstract

In this paper, we investigate the user's reactions to received suggestion by an Embodied Conversational Agent playing the role of artificial therapist in the healthy eating domain. Specifically, we analyse the behaviour of people who voluntarily requested to receive information from the agent, and we compare it with the results of a previous evaluation experiment in which subjects were not properly motivated to interact with the agent because they were selected for evaluating the system. This study is part of an ongoing research aimed at developing an intelligent virtual agent that applies natural argumentation techniques to persuade the users to improve their eating habits.