TalkTive: A Conversational Agent Using Backchannels to Engage Older Adults in Neurocognitive Disorders Screening

TL;DR

This paper introduces TalkTive, a conversational agent with backchanneling abilities designed to engage older adults in neurocognitive screening, demonstrating improved participant appreciation for proactive responses.

Contribution

Developed a backchanneling system for CAs based on analysis of real conversations, enabling more engaging interactions with older adults in cognitive assessments.

Findings

Proactive backchannels are more appreciated than reactive ones.

TalkTive can predict timing and form of backchannels during assessments.

Participants responded positively to the backchanneling feature.

Abstract

Conversational agents (CAs) have the great potential in mitigating the clinicians' burden in screening for neurocognitive disorders among older adults. It is important, therefore, to develop CAs that can be engaging, to elicit conversational speech input from older adult participants for supporting assessment of cognitive abilities. As an initial step, this paper presents research in developing the backchanneling ability in CAs in the form of a verbal response to engage the speaker. We analyzed 246 conversations of cognitive assessments between older adults and human assessors, and derived the categories of reactive backchannels (e.g. "hmm") and proactive backchannels (e.g. "please keep going"). This is used in the development of TalkTive, a CA which can predict both timing and form of backchanneling during cognitive assessments. The study then invited 36 older adult participants to evaluate the backchanneling feature. Results show that proactive backchanneling is more appreciated by participants than reactive backchanneling.