activity
20172026
most citedDetection of social signals for recognizing engagement in human-robot interaction

10 citations · 21 across the 22 of their papers we have counts for

collaborators

25 papers

cs.MM2026

Multimodal Temporal Modeling for Continuous Group Emotion Recognition in Multi-party Dialogues

Soma Iwata, Koji Inoue, Muyun Wu +3

To realize natural behavior in dialogue agents in multi-party dialogue scenarios, it is important to understand group emotion such as valence and arousal as a whole. Most prior wor…

cs.CL2026

TEIDAN: A Multilingual Multiparty Dialogue Corpus

Taiga Mori, Koji Inoue, Mikey Elmers +2

Multi-party interaction is a central setting for human communication and a necessary target for human-agent interaction systems that must participate in group conversation. Yet ava…

cs.RO2026

Human-robot conversation with multiple participants in noisy public spaces

Divesh Lala, Yogeeswaran Muthukumaran, Vincent Fernandes +10

For noisy real-world environments such as those in open public spaces, spoken dialogue systems for both autonomous robots and avatars should be carefully designed to provide enhanc…

cs.HC2026

Real-time Generation of Listener Nodding via Prediction of Kinematic Parameters for Avatar Dialogue Systems

Kazushi Kato, Koji Inoue, Taiga Mori +2

In human dialogue, we achieve smooth communication by expressing nonverbal cues such as eye contact, nodding, and facial expressions with precise timing. It is expected for convers…

cs.CL2026

On the Structure of Address in Multi-Party Dialogue: From Discrete Labels to Continuous Levels

Taiga Mori, Koji Inoue, Divesh Lala +1

In multi-party dialogues between a dialogue system and multiple users, identifying to whom an utterance is addressed is a key challenge. Prior work has typically treated addressee…

cs.CL2025

Multilingual and Continuous Backchannel Prediction: A Cross-lingual Study

Koji Inoue, Mikey Elmers, Yahui Fu +5

We present a multilingual, continuous backchannel prediction model for Japanese, English, and Chinese, and use it to investigate cross-linguistic timing behavior. The model is Tran…

cs.RO2025

Why Report Failed Interactions With Robots?! Towards Vignette-based Interaction Quality

Agnes Axelsson, Merle Reimann, Ronald Cumbal +2

Although the quality of human-robot interactions has improved with the advent of LLMs, there are still various factors that cause systems to be sub-optimal when compared to human-h…

cs.HC2025

Real-time Generation of Various Types of Nodding for Avatar Attentive Listening System

Kazushi Kato, Koji Inoue, Divesh Lala +2

In human dialogue, nonverbal information such as nodding and facial expressions is as crucial as verbal information, and spoken dialogue systems are also expected to express such n…

cs.CL2025

Prompt-Guided Turn-Taking Prediction

Koji Inoue, Mikey Elmers, Yahui Fu +4

Turn-taking prediction models are essential components in spoken dialogue systems and conversational robots. Recent approaches leverage transformer-based architectures to predict s…

cs.CL2025★ 2 cited

Triadic Multi-party Voice Activity Projection for Turn-taking in Spoken Dialogue Systems

Mikey Elmers, Koji Inoue, Divesh Lala +1

Turn-taking is a fundamental component of spoken dialogue, however conventional studies mostly involve dyadic settings. This work focuses on applying voice activity projection (VAP…

cs.RO2025

Does the Appearance of Autonomous Conversational Robots Affect User Spoken Behaviors in Real-World Conference Interactions?

Zi Haur Pang, Yahui Fu, Divesh Lala +3

We investigate the impact of robot appearance on users' spoken behavior during real-world interactions by comparing a human-like android, ERICA, with a less anthropomorphic humanoi…

cs.CL2025

An LLM Benchmark for Addressee Recognition in Multi-modal Multi-party Dialogue

Koji Inoue, Divesh Lala, Mikey Elmers +2

Handling multi-party dialogues represents a significant step for advancing spoken dialogue systems, necessitating the development of tasks specific to multi-party interactions. To…

cs.CL2025

Why Do We Laugh? Annotation and Taxonomy Generation for Laughable Contexts in Spontaneous Text Conversation

Koji Inoue, Mikey Elmers, Divesh Lala +1

Laughter serves as a multifaceted communicative signal in human interaction, yet its identification within dialogue presents a significant challenge for conversational AI systems.…

cs.CL2024

Human-Like Embodied AI Interviewer: Employing Android ERICA in Real International Conference

Zi Haur Pang, Yahui Fu, Divesh Lala +3

This paper introduces the human-like embodied AI interviewer which integrates android robots equipped with advanced conversational capabilities, including attentive listening, conv…

cs.CL2024

Analysis and Detection of Differences in Spoken User Behaviors between Autonomous and Wizard-of-Oz Systems

Mikey Elmers, Koji Inoue, Divesh Lala +2

This study examined users' behavioral differences in a large corpus of Japanese human-robot interactions, comparing interactions between a tele-operated robot and an autonomous dia…

cs.CL2024★ 1 cited

Yeah, Un, Oh: Continuous and Real-time Backchannel Prediction with Fine-tuning of Voice Activity Projection

Koji Inoue, Divesh Lala, Gabriel Skantze +1

In human conversations, short backchannel utterances such as "yeah" and "oh" play a crucial role in facilitating smooth and engaging dialogue. These backchannels signal attentivene…

cs.CL2024

Evaluation of a semi-autonomous attentive listening system with takeover prompting

Haruki Kawai, Divesh Lala, Koji Inoue +2

The handling of communication breakdowns and loss of engagement is an important aspect of spoken dialogue systems, particularly for chatting systems such as attentive listening, wh…

cs.CL2024★ 2 cited

Acknowledgment of Emotional States: Generating Validating Responses for Empathetic Dialogue

Zi Haur Pang, Yahui Fu, Divesh Lala +3

In the realm of human-AI dialogue, the facilitation of empathetic responses is important. Validation is one of the key communication techniques in psychology, which entails recogni…

cs.CL2024

An Analysis of User Behaviors for Objectively Evaluating Spoken Dialogue Systems

Koji Inoue, Divesh Lala, Keiko Ochi +2

Establishing evaluation schemes for spoken dialogue systems is important, but it can also be challenging. While subjective evaluations are commonly used in user experiments, object…

cs.CL2023

Towards Objective Evaluation of Socially-Situated Conversational Robots: Assessing Human-Likeness through Multimodal User Behaviors

Koji Inoue, Divesh Lala, Keiko Ochi +2

This paper tackles the challenging task of evaluating socially situated conversational robots and presents a novel objective evaluation approach that relies on multimodal user beha…

cs.RO2022

Alzheimer's Dementia Detection through Spontaneous Dialogue with Proactive Robotic Listeners

Yuanchao Li, Catherine Lai, Divesh Lala +2

As the aging of society continues to accelerate, Alzheimer's Disease (AD) has received more and more attention from not only medical but also other fields, such as computer science…

cs.CL2021

ERICA: An Empathetic Android Companion for Covid-19 Quarantine

Etsuko Ishii, Genta Indra Winata, Samuel Cahyawijaya +3

Over the past year, research in various domains, including Natural Language Processing (NLP), has been accelerated to fight against the COVID-19 pandemic, yet such research has jus…

cs.CL2021★ 1 cited

Intelligent Conversational Android ERICA Applied to Attentive Listening and Job Interview

Tatsuya Kawahara, Koji Inoue, Divesh Lala

Following the success of spoken dialogue systems (SDS) in smartphone assistants and smart speakers, a number of communicative robots are developed and commercialized. Compared with…

cs.CL2020★ 5 cited

Designing Precise and Robust Dialogue Response Evaluators

Tianyu Zhao, Divesh Lala, Tatsuya Kawahara

Automatic dialogue response evaluator has been proposed as an alternative to automated metrics and human evaluation. However, existing automatic evaluators achieve only moderate co…