Development of Text-Based Facilitation Dialogue System for Practical Use at Meeting on Childcare Facilities

Abstract

In recent years, the needs of childcare providers have become increasingly diverse due to various social changes. In addition, childcare workers gain more responsibilities due to the increasing expectations of childcare workers, such as reasonable accommodation and family support. In this study, we focused on the meeting stressor among the childcare workers' stressors, and examined the intervention of a facilitating dialogue system in the meeting. The purpose of this study is to make it easier for the next speaker to express his/her opinion and to activate discussion in a meeting by using the developed system. In the proposed system, the actions of the system are "topic shaking", "confirmation", and "concrete digging", and the system was developed on a text basis as a preliminary step to a spoken dialogue system. The system implements speech act estimation using BERT and key phrase extraction using KeyBERT, and is designed to use slot filling for dialogue management. The results of the evaluation experiments suggested that in the "topic shaking" and "confirmation" actions, the system may make it easier for the next speaker to express his/her opinion and may activate discussion.