A Dialogue System for the Elderly Considering Utterance Intention

In this paper, we propose a dialog system for the elderly. The aim of the proposed system is to encourage and satisfy their appetite for conversation. To promote the appetite, contents of the conversation should be broad. In addition, the system should estimate the feeling of the elderly. In the proposed system, sentences are created using the information from Web and the language resources such as Japanese Google N-grams and Kyoto-University-Case-frame. As for usage of Web, the proposed system employs Google Suggest, which is an API offered by Google. The proposed system extracts related words such as noun, adjective, and adjective verb, and creates variable sentences. By considering of the frequency of the words, a suitable and natural sentence can be selected. We carried out experiments to evaluate the proposed system in terms of Grice's axiom and confirmed the effectiveness of the system.