Narimasa Watanabe

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About

Narimasa Watanabe is a researcher at the forefront of human-robot interaction, specializing in conversational AI for elderly care. His key research areas include active listening systems, speech dialogue technology, and empathetic response generation for social robots. Watanabe’s most notable contribution is the development of an active listening system for conversation robots, designed to reduce dementia and loneliness in older adults through reminiscence therapy. This system generates backchanneling, repeats user utterances, and asks for missing predicates in speech recognition results, while also producing empathetic responses based on emotion estimation. A key innovation is its robustness to speech recognition errors, using confidence scores to guide response generation. In an evaluation with 110 participants, 45.5% sustained conversations for over two minutes on topics like “impressionable travels.” With 15 citations for this 2017 work, Watanabe’s research has laid foundational groundwork for socially assistive robots that provide meaningful, human-like interaction. His work continues to influence the design of empathetic, error-tolerant dialogue systems for vulnerable populations.