As voice-based assistants such as Alexa, Siri, and Google Assistant become ubiquitous, users increasingly expect to maintain natural and informative conversations with such systems. However, for an open-domain conversational system to be coherent and engaging, it must be able to maintain the user's interest for extended periods, without sounding boring or annoying. In this paper, we investigate one natural approach to this problem, of modulating response prosody, i.e., changing the pitch and cadence of the response to indicate delight, sadness or other common emotions, as well as using pre-recorded interjections. Intuitively, this approach should improve the naturalness of the conversation, but attempts to quantify the effects of prosodic modulation on user satisfaction and engagement remain challenging. To accomplish this, we report results obtained from a large-scale empirical study that measures the effects of prosodic modulation on user behavior and engagement across multiple conversation domains, both immediately after each turn, and at the overall conversation level. Our results indicate that the prosody modulation significantly increases both immediate and overall user satisfaction. However, since the effects vary across different domains, we verify that prosody modulations do not substitute for coherent, informative content of the responses. Together, our results provide useful tools and insights for improving the naturalness of responses in conversational systems.
Infinite Scrolling, Finite Satisfaction: Exploring User Behavior and Satisfaction on Social Media in Bangladesh
Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology（孟加拉国工程与技术大学）；East West University（东西大学）；Ahsanullah University of Science and Technology（阿赫桑拉科学技术大学）
Towards Recommender Systems LLMs Playground (RecSysLLMsP): Exploring Polarization and Engagement in Simulated Social Networks
Institute for Artificial Intelligence Research and Development of Serbia（塞尔维亚人工智能研究与发展研究所）；University of Belgrade（贝尔格莱德大学）；Polytechnic University of Bari（巴里理工大学）；University of Kragujevac（克拉古耶瓦茨大学）
