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Construction of Responsive Utterance Corpus for Attentive Listening Response Production

In Japan, the number of single-person households, particularly among the elderly, is increasing. Consequently, opportunities for people to narrate are being reduced. To address this issue, conversational agents, e.g., communication robots and smart speakers, are expected to play the role of the listener. To realize these agents, this paper describes the collection of conversational responses by listeners that demonstrate attentive listening attitudes toward narrative speakers, and a method to annotate existing narrative speech with responsive utterances is proposed. To summarize, 148,962 responsive utterances by 11 listeners were collected in a narrative corpus comprising 13,234 utterance units. The collected responsive utterances were analyzed in terms of response frequency, diversity, coverage, and naturalness. These results demonstrated that diverse and natural responsive utterances were collected by the proposed method in an efficient and comprehensive manner. To demonstrate the practical use of the collected responsive utterances, an experiment was conducted, in which response generation timings were detected in narratives.