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Predicting Nods by using Dialogue Acts in Dialogue

In addition to verbal behavior, nonverbal behavior is an important aspect for an embodied dialogue system to be able to conduct a smooth conversation with the user. Researchers have focused on automatically generating nonverbal behavior from speech and language information of dialogue systems. We propose a model to generate head nods accompanying utterance from natural language. To the best of our knowledge, previous studies generated nods from the final morphemes at the end of an utterance. In this study, we focused on dialog act information indicating the intention of an utterance and determined whether this information is effective for generating nods. First, we compiled a Japanese corpus of 24 dialogues including utterance and nod information. Next, using the corpus, we created a model that estimates whether a nod occurs during an utterance by using a morpheme at the end of a speech and dialog act. The results show that our estimation model incorporating dialog acts outperformed a model using morpheme information. The results suggest that dialog acts have the potential to be a strong predictor with which to generate nods automatically.