Personality-adapted multimodal dialogue system

TL;DR

This paper presents a multimodal dialogue system that adapts to individual users by estimating their personality traits in real-time, enhancing natural interaction and effectiveness in sightseeing recommendations.

Contribution

It introduces a novel user-adaptive dialogue management approach that incorporates real-time personality estimation from face images using pretrained DNN models.

Findings

System ranked first in overall competition performance.

Subjective user evaluations exceeded baseline and other systems.

Effective in reducing user nervousness and improving dialogue naturalness.

Abstract

This paper describes a personality-adaptive multimodal dialogue system developed for the Dialogue Robot Competition 2022. To realize a dialogue system that adapts the dialogue strategy to individual users, it is necessary to consider the user's nonverbal information and personality. In this competition, we built a prototype of a user-adaptive dialogue system that estimates user personality during dialogue. Pretrained DNN models are used to estimate user personalities annotated as Big Five scores. This model is embedded in a dialogue system to estimate user personality from face images during the dialogue. We proposed a method for dialogue management that changed the dialogue flow based on the estimated personality characteristics and confirmed that the system works in a real environment in the preliminary round of this competition. Furthermore, we implemented specific modules to enhance the multimodal dialogue experience of the user, including personality assessment, controlling facial expressions and movements of the android, and dialogue management to explain the attractiveness of sightseeing spots. The aim of dialogue based on personality assessment is to reduce the nervousness of users, and it acts as an ice breaker. The android's facial expressions and movements are necessary for a more natural android conversation. Since the task of this competition was to promote the appeal of sightseeing spots and to recommend an appropriate sightseeing spot, the dialogue process for how to explain the attractiveness of the spot is important. All results of the subjective evaluation by users were better than those of the baseline and other systems developed for this competition. The proposed dialogue system ranked first in both "Impression Rating" and "Effectiveness of Android Recommendations". According to the total evaluation in the competition, the proposed system was ranked first overall.