Entertainment Chatbot for the Digital Inclusion of Elderly People Without Abstraction Capabilities
Current language processing technologies allow the creation of conversational chatbot platforms. Even though artificial intelligence is still too immature to support satisfactory user experience in many mass market domains, conversational interfaces have found their way into <italic>ad hoc<...
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| Format: | Article |
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IEEE
2021-01-01
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| Series: | IEEE Access |
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| Online Access: | https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9432816/ |
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| author | Silvia Garcia-Mendez Francisco De Arriba-Perez Francisco J. Gonzalez-Castano Jose A. Regueiro-Janeiro Felipe Gil-Castineira |
| author_facet | Silvia Garcia-Mendez Francisco De Arriba-Perez Francisco J. Gonzalez-Castano Jose A. Regueiro-Janeiro Felipe Gil-Castineira |
| author_sort | Silvia Garcia-Mendez |
| collection | DOAJ |
| description | Current language processing technologies allow the creation of conversational chatbot platforms. Even though artificial intelligence is still too immature to support satisfactory user experience in many mass market domains, conversational interfaces have found their way into <italic>ad hoc</italic> applications such as call centres and online shopping assistants. However, they have not been applied so far to social inclusion of elderly people, who are particularly vulnerable to the digital divide. Many of them relieve their loneliness with traditional media such as TV and radio, which are known to create a feeling of companionship. In this paper we present the EBER chatbot, designed to reduce the digital gap for the elderly. EBER reads news in the background and adapts its responses to the user’s mood. Its novelty lies in the concept of “intelligent radio”, according to which, instead of simplifying a digital information system to make it accessible to the elderly, a traditional channel they find familiar -background news- is augmented with interactions via voice dialogues. We make it possible by combining Artificial Intelligence Modelling Language, automatic Natural Language Generation and Sentiment Analysis. The system allows accessing digital content of interest by combining words extracted from user answers to chatbot questions with keywords extracted from the news items. This approach permits defining metrics of the abstraction capabilities of the users depending on a spatial representation of the word space. To prove the suitability of the proposed solution we present results of real experiments conducted with elderly people that provided valuable insights. Our approach was considered satisfactory during the tests and improved the information search capabilities of the participants. |
| format | Article |
| id | doaj-art-e50e776efbea4e408019d71e7017955c |
| institution | OA Journals |
| issn | 2169-3536 |
| language | English |
| publishDate | 2021-01-01 |
| publisher | IEEE |
| record_format | Article |
| series | IEEE Access |
| spelling | doaj-art-e50e776efbea4e408019d71e7017955c2025-08-20T01:59:14ZengIEEEIEEE Access2169-35362021-01-019758787589110.1109/ACCESS.2021.30808379432816Entertainment Chatbot for the Digital Inclusion of Elderly People Without Abstraction CapabilitiesSilvia Garcia-Mendez0https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0533-1303Francisco De Arriba-Perez1https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1140-679XFrancisco J. Gonzalez-Castano2https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5225-8378Jose A. Regueiro-Janeiro3https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1280-1126Felipe Gil-Castineira4https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5164-0855Information Technologies Group, atlanTTic, Telecommunication Engineering School, University of Vigo, Vigo, SpainInformation Technologies Group, atlanTTic, Telecommunication Engineering School, University of Vigo, Vigo, SpainInformation Technologies Group, atlanTTic, Telecommunication Engineering School, University of Vigo, Vigo, SpainInformation Technologies Group, atlanTTic, Telecommunication Engineering School, University of Vigo, Vigo, SpainInformation Technologies Group, atlanTTic, Telecommunication Engineering School, University of Vigo, Vigo, SpainCurrent language processing technologies allow the creation of conversational chatbot platforms. Even though artificial intelligence is still too immature to support satisfactory user experience in many mass market domains, conversational interfaces have found their way into <italic>ad hoc</italic> applications such as call centres and online shopping assistants. However, they have not been applied so far to social inclusion of elderly people, who are particularly vulnerable to the digital divide. Many of them relieve their loneliness with traditional media such as TV and radio, which are known to create a feeling of companionship. In this paper we present the EBER chatbot, designed to reduce the digital gap for the elderly. EBER reads news in the background and adapts its responses to the user’s mood. Its novelty lies in the concept of “intelligent radio”, according to which, instead of simplifying a digital information system to make it accessible to the elderly, a traditional channel they find familiar -background news- is augmented with interactions via voice dialogues. We make it possible by combining Artificial Intelligence Modelling Language, automatic Natural Language Generation and Sentiment Analysis. The system allows accessing digital content of interest by combining words extracted from user answers to chatbot questions with keywords extracted from the news items. This approach permits defining metrics of the abstraction capabilities of the users depending on a spatial representation of the word space. To prove the suitability of the proposed solution we present results of real experiments conducted with elderly people that provided valuable insights. Our approach was considered satisfactory during the tests and improved the information search capabilities of the participants.https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9432816/Text processingaginghuman-computer interactionuser experienceconversational interface |
| spellingShingle | Silvia Garcia-Mendez Francisco De Arriba-Perez Francisco J. Gonzalez-Castano Jose A. Regueiro-Janeiro Felipe Gil-Castineira Entertainment Chatbot for the Digital Inclusion of Elderly People Without Abstraction Capabilities IEEE Access Text processing aging human-computer interaction user experience conversational interface |
| title | Entertainment Chatbot for the Digital Inclusion of Elderly People Without Abstraction Capabilities |
| title_full | Entertainment Chatbot for the Digital Inclusion of Elderly People Without Abstraction Capabilities |
| title_fullStr | Entertainment Chatbot for the Digital Inclusion of Elderly People Without Abstraction Capabilities |
| title_full_unstemmed | Entertainment Chatbot for the Digital Inclusion of Elderly People Without Abstraction Capabilities |
| title_short | Entertainment Chatbot for the Digital Inclusion of Elderly People Without Abstraction Capabilities |
| title_sort | entertainment chatbot for the digital inclusion of elderly people without abstraction capabilities |
| topic | Text processing aging human-computer interaction user experience conversational interface |
| url | https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9432816/ |
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