Continuous measurement of willingness to participate in others' conversation

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to clarify appropriate timing for helping people to join in others’ conversation by quantifying continuous changes in people's willingness to engage in the conversation. As online communication has become more popular in recent years, it is important to elucidate how one can support many people to actively participate in an ongoing conversation. We conducted an experiment to obtain continuous changes in willingness to join in a multi-person discussion conversation presented on a computer monitor. As a result, we found that the willingness to engage in the conversation increased when laughter and silence occur in the discussion. We believe that the results of the present study can be used to develop a dialogue system that supports people to easily join in a conversation by intentionally inserting laughter and silence when people want to express their opinions but are not sure of the timing to speak.