Analysis of conversations that students had with a robot in a university

Abstract

Mental health problems among college students have become increasingly serious. We thought installing a conversation robot on university campuses to early intervene in students' mental health care. As a first step of investigating the effectiveness of this idea, we conducted a field trial in which a robot controlled remotely by an operator have a chat with passing students on a campus. In the trial, we set up two conditions in which the robot praised the participant and in which the robot did not praised him/her and carried out exploratory analysis of relationships among participants' personality inventory, changes of temporary moods and utterance sentiments. The results suggest that the pattern of mood change and the trend in the occurrence of polarity in utterances differ when the robot praises and does not praise, even if the personality traits are similar, and that the pattern of mood change differs even if the occurrence of polarity in utterances is similar.