Context respectful counseling agent integrated with robot nodding for dialog promotion

Abstract

Nowadays, a lot of IT personnel have psychological distress. Meanwhile, counselors to help them are lack in number. To solve the problem, we proposed a counseling agent (CA) called CRECA (context respectful counseling agent). CRECA listens to clients and promotes their reflection context respectfully namely in a context preserving way. This agent can be enhanced using a body language called "unazuki" in Japanese, a kind of "nodding" to greatly promote dialogue, often accompanying "un-un" (meaning "exactly") of Japanese onomatopoeia. This body language is expected to significantly help represent empathy or entire approval. In this paper, the agent is integrated with such a "unazuki" or "dialog promotion nodding" robot to continue the conversation naturally or context respectfully towards clients' further reflection. To realize such "unazuki", the robot nods twice at each end of dialog sentence input by clients. The experimental evaluation proves such nodding is effective in counseling.