Collection and Analysis of Dialogues Provided by Two Speakers Acting as One (2020)

Abstract: We are studying a cooperation style where multiple speakers can provide both advanced dialogue services and operator education. We focus on a style in which two operators interact with a user by pretending to be a single operator. For two operators to effectively act as one, each must adjust his/her conversational content and timing to the other. In the process, we expect each operator to experience the conversational content of his/her partner as if it were his/her own, creating efficient and effective learning of the other’s skill. We analyzed this educational effect and examined whether dialogue services can be successfully provided by collecting travel guidance dialogue data from operators who give travel information to users. In this paper, we report our preliminary results on dialogue content and user satisfaction of operators and users.

## introduction such dialogue services as counseling @xcite are often provided through telecommunication systems that enable speakers (typically called operators) to talk from remote places @xcite @xcite . for such services to be more productive, it is desirable that the skills of the operators are improved. in this paper, we propose a unique learning style in which multiple operators with different skills cooperate and pretend to be one person (fig. 1 ). for two operators to effectively act as one, each must adjust his/her conversational content and timing to the other. in this style, each operator may experience the conversational content of his/her partner as if it were his/her own, creating efficient and effective learning of the other's skill. users also benefit; they do not have to interact id spk utterance 1 u hello. i am planning trips to nara and osaka prefectures. what sightseeing spots do you recommend? 2 gn hello. in the nara area, i recommend todaiji temple and nara park. 3 u i see. how can i get to them? 4 gn you can walk to todaiji temple from kintetsu nara station through nara park. 5 u thank you. how about osaka? 6 gn (your turn.) 7 go (ok.) 8 go well, in osaka, i recommend osaka castle and universal studios. 9 u those are both famous. 10 go you can easily get to them by train. 11 u i'm glad they are so convenient. by the way, in nara, do you recommend any restaurants where i can eat local food around those two spots? 12 go (why don't you answer?) 13 gn (sure.) 14 gn i recommend asuka nabe. 15 u i see. any idea how much it costs? figure 1: example of mixto1 condition where two guides with different skills pretend to be one guide who talks to a user (u). one guide has knowledge about travel in nara (gn), and the other knows osaka (go). for readability, user utterances are shown in bold. parentheses represent invisible to a user. with a lot of operators and can establish one-toone relationships. there were studies that aimed at increasing the perceived number of speakers for better interaction despite that there is only a single operator @xcite ; our idea here is the opposite. many prior studies exist where multiple actors work together to provide dialogue services. cooperative architectures with multiple agents or human operators have attracted attention with regards to the development of dialogue systems @xcite ; nakano et al., 2011) as well as wizard-of-oz systems @xcite . users talking with a dialogue assistant controlled by multiple speakers on the cloud are reported to receive more reasonable responses @xcite . however, no research has examined the basic effect of behaving as one speaker on the satisfaction of the operators and their interlocutors. it remains especially unclear whether multiple operators who are acting as one promote mutual skill learning. the following is the contribution of this study. first, we show a method for collecting text-chat dialogues in which two speakers acting as one person. second, we show the basic effects of two speakers who are pretending to be just one person on the dialogue's content and the satisfaction of the operators and the interlocutors. ## subjective impressions of speakers we analyzed the overall satisfaction impressions of the guides and users on a 7-point likert scale (7 = totally agree, 1 = totally disagree). ## conclusion we evaluated a situation in which two operators with different skills acted as one. we collected travel guide dialogues where two operators acting as one speaker, as two speakers, and alone. we evaluated the contents under each condition as well as the satisfaction of the operators and users. the operators experienced increased satisfaction with their learning and cooperation. the users were not dissatisfied with the situation of two operators speaking as one. it is suggested that the proposed cooperation style gives operators an opportunity to engage in advanced dialogue services as well as to learn the skills of the other operators. in the future, we must scrutinize how the operators increased their satisfaction with learning and evaluate what kind of knowledge sharing occurred between the operators. we also need to examine a combination of other kinds of skills.