Small Talk Improves User Impressions of Interview Dialogue Systems

This paper addresses the problem of how to build interview systems that users are willing to use. Existing interview dialogue systems are mainly focused on obtaining information from users, thus they just repeatedly ask questions. We propose a method for improving user impressions by engaging in small talk during interviews. The system performs framebased dialogue management for interviewing and generates small talk utterances after the user answers the system's questions. Experimental results using a textbased interview dialogue system for diet recording showed the proposed method gives a better impression to users than interview dialogues without small talk. It is also found that generating too many small talk utterances makes user impressions worse because of the system's low capability of continuously generating appropriate small talk utterances.