Construction of Responsive Utterance Corpus for Attentive Listening Response Production

Koichiro Ito, Masaki Murata, Tomohiro Ohno, Shigeki Matsubara


Abstract
In Japan, the number of single-person households, particularly among the elderly, is increasing. Consequently, opportunities for people to narrate are being reduced. To address this issue, conversational agents, e.g., communication robots and smart speakers, are expected to play the role of the listener. To realize these agents, this paper describes the collection of conversational responses by listeners that demonstrate attentive listening attitudes toward narrative speakers, and a method to annotate existing narrative speech with responsive utterances is proposed. To summarize, 148,962 responsive utterances by 11 listeners were collected in a narrative corpus comprising 13,234 utterance units. The collected responsive utterances were analyzed in terms of response frequency, diversity, coverage, and naturalness. These results demonstrated that diverse and natural responsive utterances were collected by the proposed method in an efficient and comprehensive manner. To demonstrate the practical use of the collected responsive utterances, an experiment was conducted, in which response generation timings were detected in narratives.
Anthology ID:
2022.lrec-1.786
Volume:
Proceedings of the Thirteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference
Month:
June
Year:
2022
Address:
Marseille, France
Editors:
Nicoletta Calzolari, Frédéric Béchet, Philippe Blache, Khalid Choukri, Christopher Cieri, Thierry Declerck, Sara Goggi, Hitoshi Isahara, Bente Maegaard, Joseph Mariani, Hélène Mazo, Jan Odijk, Stelios Piperidis
Venue:
LREC
SIG:
Publisher:
European Language Resources Association
Note:
Pages:
7244–7252
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.lrec-1.786
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Koichiro Ito, Masaki Murata, Tomohiro Ohno, and Shigeki Matsubara. 2022. Construction of Responsive Utterance Corpus for Attentive Listening Response Production. In Proceedings of the Thirteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference, pages 7244–7252, Marseille, France. European Language Resources Association.
Cite (Informal):
Construction of Responsive Utterance Corpus for Attentive Listening Response Production (Ito et al., LREC 2022)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.lrec-1.786.pdf