Discussion Support Agent System to Promote Equalization of Speech among Participants

Abstract

Reducing the imbalance of speech length in discussions is expected to improve decision making and collaborative learning. In this paper, we propose a facilitation system based on the cumulative percentage of utterances in discussions. We surveyed the effectiveness of this system on the collaborative learning from the perspective of standard deviation of utterance length and percentage of utterances throughout discussions. we collected 20-minutes discussion data under the topic “What is a thoughtful consideration?” and “What is happiness?” from seven groups of three participants. Each group had two discussions, one with the system and one without the system. The results revealed that the facilitation system decreased subjective and objective imbalance of speech length. Additionally, turn-taking was active in the group which facilitation by the system was effective.