A Support System for Collecting/Selecting Topics in Chat Using Context/Physiological Information

Abstract

People who are not engaging conversationalists often experience awkward silences in their conversations. The reason is that they have no topic that they deem sufficiently interesting at that moment to talk about; consequently, they cannot keep their conversation going. To solve this problem, this paper proposes a system that helps people create their own diary, select a topic from it, and converse smoothly on that topic. The results of comparative experiments conducted indicate that the proposed system enables users to write more topics than a simple diary system by presenting activity information when they go out. Furthermore, the diary created using the proposed system enables them to converse about the contents for a longer time with ease. In addition, by presenting candidate topics, the users could recollect topics faster and felt that the topics could be changed smoothly into next ones when talking for a long time.