Causality Reasoning for Empathy-Enriched and Personality-Conditioned Spoken Dialogue System (2023)

Abstract: The author’s objective centers around developing a spoken dialogue system (SDS) that can emulate the cognitive and conversational qualities of a human friend. Key attributes such as empathy, knowledge/causality reasoning, and personality are integral components of human interaction. The proposed approach involves the creation of an Empathy-enriched SDS , capable of comprehending human emotions and circumstances, thus providing companionship and assistance akin to a trusted friend. Additionally, the Causality-reasoning for SDS aims to ground the system in commonsense knowledge and equip it with the ability to reason about causalities, such as predicting user desires/reactions and system intentions/reactions, thereby enhancing the system’s intelligence and human-like behavior. Finally, the concept of a Personality-conditioned SDS involves enabling systems to exhibit distinct personalities, further enhancing the naturalness of human-robot interaction.

## spoken dialogue system (sds) research in the forthcoming years, two potential directions for the sds community could involve the automated evaluation of subjective aspects within sds and developing personalized sds to cater to users with diverse personalities.