Generating Candidate Responses for Supporting Human-to-human Communication of Quality of Life

Abstract

We aim to build a system to improve the quality of communication between elderly individuals and their families by sharing information about the elderly members’ quality of life (QOL). As the first step in the creation of a system to generate utterances containing information on QOL, we propose a methodology for building a QOL-labeled dialog corpus and discuss the generation of responses that transmit specific QOL information using QOL labels. To build the corpus, we conducted preliminary experiments to demonstrate that certain crowd workers provide responses that are indistinguishable from those given by elderly individuals. Based on this, we constructed a large-scale QOL-labeled dialog corpus using crowdsourcing effectively. Our response generation experiments using the constructed corpus demonstrated that the generated utterances can be useful in transmitting QOL information. For example, the prompt “She reads a book as soon as she gets home” generated the response “I’ll read her a book next time” in case of the QOL label is 《health satisfaction (positive)》 or “Even reading the newspaper is difficult for me” in case of 《health satisfaction (negative)》.