Towards a Computational Model of Small Group Facilitation

A physically situated robot in conversational situations, which is enabled to understand and generate human conversational protocols, has a big potential to facilitate conversation in a small group. In this paper, we present a computational model of facilitation process in a small group, including (1) procedural behaviour decision process controlling engage- ment density to regulate a socially imbalanced situation and (2) language generation process associated with user models, which attempts to trigger participants’ interests. We implemented the model on a conversational robot and assessed the effectiveness of the procedural behavior generation.