Culture-Related Topic Selection in Small Talk Conversations across Germany and Japan

Small talk can be used in order to build a positive relationship towards a virtual character. However the choice of topics in a conversation can be dependent on social background. In this paper, we explore culture-related differences in small talk for the German and Japanese cultures. Based on findings from the literature and verified by a corpus analysis, we integrated prototypical German and Japanese small talk conversations into a multiagent system. In evaluation studies conducted in the two target cultures, we investigated whether participants prefer agent dialogs that were designed to reflect their own cultural background.

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