Rapport-Driven Virtual Agent: Rapport Building Dialogue Strategy for Improving User Experience at First Meeting
<|reference_start|>Rapport-Driven Virtual Agent: Rapport Building Dialogue Strategy for Improving User Experience at First Meeting: Rapport is known as a conversational aspect focusing on relationship building, which influences outcomes in collaborative tasks. This study aims to establish human-agent rapport through small talk by using a rapport-building strategy. We implemented this strategy for the virtual agents based on dialogue strategies by prompting a large language model (LLM). In particular, we utilized two dialogue strategies-predefined sequence and free-form-to guide the dialogue generation framework. We conducted analyses based on human evaluations, examining correlations between total turn, utterance characters, rapport score, and user experience variables: naturalness, satisfaction, interest, engagement, and usability. We investigated correlations between rapport score and naturalness, satisfaction, engagement, and conversation flow. Our experimental results also indicated that using free-form to prompt the rapport-building strategy performed the best in subjective scores.<|reference_end|>
@article{baihaqi2024rapport-driven,
    title={Rapport-Driven Virtual Agent: Rapport Building Dialogue Strategy for
  Improving User Experience at First Meeting},
    author={Muhammad Yeza Baihaqi and Angel Garc'ia Contreras and Seiya Kawano
  and Koichiro Yoshino},
    journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2406.09839},
    year={2024},
    archivePrefix={arXiv},
    eprint={2406.09839},
    primaryClass={cs.CL cs.HC}
}