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Negotiated Collusion: Modeling Social Language and its Relationship Effects in Intelligent Agents

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Abstract

Building a collaborative trusting relationship with users is crucial in a wide range of applications, such as advice-giving or financial transactions, and some minimal degree of cooperativeness is required in all applications to even initiate and maintain an interaction with a user. Despite the importance of this aspect of human–human relationships, few intelligent systems have tried to build user models of trust, credibility, or other similar interpersonal variables, or to influence these variables during interaction with users. Humans use a variety of kinds of social language, including small talk, to establish collaborative trusting interpersonal relationships. We argue that such strategies can also be used by intelligent agents, and that embodied conversational agents are ideally suited for this task given the myriad multimodal cues available to them for managing conversation. In this article we describe a model of the relationship between social language and interpersonal relationships, a new kind of discourse planner that is capable of generating social language to achieve interpersonal goals, and an actual implementation in an embodied conversational agent. We discuss an evaluation of our system in which the use of social language was demonstrated to have a significant effect on users’ perceptions of the agent’s knowledgableness and ability to engage users, and on their trust, credibility, and how well they felt the system knew them, for users manifesting particular personality traits.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. MIT Media Lab, 20 Ames St., E15-315, Cambridge, MA, 02139, USA

    Justine Cassell & Timothy Bickmore

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  1. Justine Cassell
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  2. Timothy Bickmore
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Cassell, J., Bickmore, T. Negotiated Collusion: Modeling Social Language and its Relationship Effects in Intelligent Agents. User Model User-Adap Inter 13, 89–132 (2003). https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1024026532471

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