Towards Social Situation Awareness in Support Agents

TL;DR

This paper proposes a conceptual architecture for social situation awareness in support agents, enabling them to understand social contexts and improve assistance through a structured, taxonomy-based approach.

Contribution

It introduces a novel architecture that conceptualizes social situation awareness as an extension of general situation awareness using situation taxonomies.

Findings

Empirical results support the effectiveness of the approach.

The architecture enables support agents to interpret social situations.

Use cases demonstrate practical application.

Abstract

Artificial agents that support people in their daily activities (e.g., virtual coaches and personal assistants) are increasingly prevalent. Since many daily activities are social in nature, support agents should understand a user's social situation to offer comprehensive support. However, there are no systematic approaches for developing support agents that are social situation aware. We identify key requirements for a support agent to be social situation aware and propose steps to realize those requirements. These steps are presented through a conceptual architecture centered on two key ideas: (1) conceptualizing social situation awareness as an instantiation of `general' situation awareness, and (2) using situation taxonomies for such instantiation. This enables support agents to represent a user's social situation, comprehend its meaning, and assess its impact on the user's behavior. We discuss empirical results supporting the effectiveness of the proposed approach and illustrate how the architecture can be used in support agents through two use cases.