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ProDial – An Annotated Proactive Dialogue Act Corpus for Conversational Assistants using Crowdsourcing

Robots will eventually enter our daily lives and assist with a variety of tasks. Especially in the household domain, robots may become indispensable helpers by overtaking tedious tasks, e.g. keeping the place tidy. Their effectiveness and efficiency, however, depend on their ability to adapt to our needs, routines, and personal characteristics. Otherwise, they may not be accepted and trusted in our private domain. For enabling adaptation, the interaction between a human and a robot needs to be personalized. Therefore, the robot needs to collect personal information from the user. However, it is unclear how such sensitive data can be collected in an understandable way without losing a user’s trust in the system. In this paper, we present a conversational approach for explicitly collecting personal user information using natural dialogue. For creating a sound interactive personalization, we have developed an empathy-augmented dialogue strategy. In an online study, the empathy-augmented strategy was compared to a baseline dialogue strategy for interactive personalization. We have found the empathy-augmented strategy to perform notably friendlier. Overall, using dialogue for interactive personalization has generally shown positive user reception.