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LAST MINUTE: An Empirical Experiment in User-Companion Interaction and Its Evaluation

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Companion Technology

Abstract

The LAST MINUTE Corpus (LMC) is a unique resource for research on issues of Companion-technology. LMC not only comprises 57.5 h of multimodal recordings (audio, video, psycho-biological data) from interactions between users—133 subjects in sum, balanced in age and gender—and a WoZ-simulated speech-based interactive dialogue system. LMC also includes full verbatim transcripts of all these dialogues, sociodemographic and psychometric data of all subjects as well as material from 73 in-depth user interviews focusing the user’s individual experience of the interaction. In this chapter the experimental design and data collection of the LMC are shortly introduced. On this basis, exemplifying results from semantic analyses of the dialogue transcripts as well as from qualitative analyses of the interview material are presented. These illustrate LMC’s potential for investigations from numerous research perspectives.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Some subjects try to unpack items before it is necessary, but these are only single cases.

  2. 2.

    The distribution is visualized here—and in other figures—as a trellis boxplot: the rectangles represent the interquartile range (i.e. the range of 25% of the values above and below the median resp.); the filled dot gives the median; the whiskers extending the rectangle extend to the range of values, but maximally to 1.5 of the interquartile range; outlier values beyond the maximal whisker range are given as unfilled dots (cf. [1]).

  3. 3.

    Unless noted otherwise, all statistical tests and calculations have been performed with the R, language [1, 25].

  4. 4.

    In order to maximize variance, interviews were chosen randomly one by one considering a balanced allocation of groups according to the qualitative sample plan (cf. Sect. 13.3.4). When no more increase of variance could be detected, no further material was added (criterion of theoretical saturation).

  5. 5.

    Participant’s initials.

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Acknowledgements

This work was done within the Transregional Collaborative Research Centre SFB/TRR 62 “Companion-Technology for Cognitive Technical Systems” funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG).

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Correspondence to Jörg Frommer .

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Frommer, J. et al. (2017). LAST MINUTE: An Empirical Experiment in User-Companion Interaction and Its Evaluation. In: Biundo, S., Wendemuth, A. (eds) Companion Technology. Cognitive Technologies. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-43665-4_13

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-43665-4_13

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