Impression effect of an educational support robot speaking based on politeness theory.

Abstract

Recently, educational support robots have attracted much attention. In conventional educational support robots, the number of questions to be solved by the learner is fixed. However, in order to encourage learners to learn spontaneously and to improve the learning effect, it is important for learners to be aware that they themselves try to solve a larger number of problems. Therefore, we considered that it would be effective for the robot to suggest that the number of problems to be solved by the learner should be increased by using the politeness theory. Therefore, this study constructs the method which the robot proposes the number of problems based on the politeness theory. The robot is equipped with three different politeness strategies, and by comparing each strategy, we investigate the impression effect that the robot's speech with each strategy makes on the learner.