PUB - Publikationen an der Universität Bielefeld

The present contribution investigates the construction of dialogue structure for the use in human-machine interaction especially for robotic systems and embodied conversational agents. We are going to present a methodology and findings of a pilot study for the design of task-specific dialogues. Specifically, we investigated effects of dialogue complexity on two levels: First, we examined the perception of the embodied conversational agent, and second, we studied participants’ performance following HRI. To do so, we manipulated the agent’s friendliness during a brief conversation with the user in a receptionist scenario. The paper presents an overview of the dialogue system, the process of dialogue construction, and initial evidence from an evaluation study with naïve users (N = 40). These users interacted with the system in a task-based dialogue in which they had to ask for the way in a building unknown to them. Afterwards participants filled in a questionnaire. Our findings show that the users prefer the friendly version of the dialogue which scored higher values both in terms of data collected via a questionnaire and in terms of data collected during the run of the experiment. Implications of the present research for follow-up studies are discussed, specifically focusing on the effects that dialogue features have on agent perception and on the user’s evaluation and performance.