We have held dialogue robot competitions in 2020 and 2022 to compare the performances of interactive robots using an android that closely resembles a human. In 2023, the third competition DRC2023 was held. The task of DRC2023 was designed to be more challenging than the previous travel agent dialogue tasks. Since anyone can now develop a dialogue system using LLMs, the participating teams are required to develop a system that effectively uses information about the situation on the spot (real-time information), which is not handled by ChatGPT and other systems. DRC2023 has two rounds, a preliminary round and the final round as well as the previous competitions. The preliminary round has held on Oct.27 -- Nov.20, 2023 at real travel agency stores. The final round will be held on December 23, 2023. This paper provides an overview of the task settings and evaluation method of DRC2023 and the preliminary round results.

Abstract-- We have reached a practical and realistic phase in human-support dialogue agents by developing a large language model (LLM). However, when requiring expert knowledge or anticipating the utterance content using the massive size of the dialogue database, we still need help with the utterance content's effectiveness and the efficiency of its output speed, even if using LLM. Therefore, we propose a framework that uses LLM asynchronously in the part of the system that returns an appropriate response and in the part that understands the user's intention and searches the database. In particular, noting that it takes time for the robot to speak, threading related to database searches is performed while the robot is speaking. This is an for actual automatic ticket sales or searching a large database asynchronous operation that separates (A) the system that and modifying the conversation based on the results.

Utilizing Large Language Models (LLMs) facilitates the creation of flexible and natural dialogues, a task that has been challenging with traditional rule-based dialogue systems. However, LLMs also have the potential to produce unexpected responses, which may not align with the intentions of dialogue system designers. To address this issue, this paper introduces a meta-control method that employs LLMs to develop more stable and adaptable dialogue systems. The method includes dialogue flow control to ensure that utterances conform to predefined scenarios and turn-taking control to foster natural dialogues. Furthermore, we have implemented a dialogue system that utilizes this meta-control strategy and verified that the dialogue system utilizing meta-control operates as intended.

This paper describes our dialogue system submitted to Dialogue Robot Competition 2023. The system's task is to help a user at a travel agency decide on a plan for visiting two sightseeing spots in Kyoto City that satisfy the user. Our dialogue system is flexible and stable and responds to user requirements by controlling dialogue flow according to dialogue scenarios. We also improved user satisfaction by introducing motion and speech control based on system utterances and user situations. In the preliminary round, our system was ranked fifth in the impression evaluation and sixth in the plan evaluation among all 12 teams.

Various studies have been conducted on human-supporting robot systems. These systems have been put to practical use over the years and are now seen in our daily lives. In particular, robots communicating smoothly with people are expected to play an active role in customer service and guidance. In this case, it is essential to determine whether the customer is satisfied with the dialog robot or not. However, it is not easy to satisfy all of the customer's requests due to the diversity of the customer's speech. In this study, we developed a dialog mechanism that prevents dialog breakdowns and keeps the customer satisfied by providing multiple scenarios for the robot to take control of the dialog. We tested it in a travel destination recommendation task at a travel agency.

Today, as seen in smart speakers, spoken dialogue technology is rapidly advancing to enable human-like interaction. However, current dialogue systems cannot pay attention not only to the content of speech, but also to the way of speaking and eye contact and facial expressions, while watching the facial expressions of the person with whom one is speaking. Therefore, this study participated in a Japanese competition called the "Dialogue Robot Competition" and attempted to develop a dialogue system that includes control of not only the content of speech but also the robot's facial expressions and gaze in order to realize a humanoid robot that can naturally interact with humans.

Attributes three and four (considerate comments and polite/positive This paper describes the travel agent dialog robot system language) were achieved by pre-programming designed by Team Irisapu for the preliminary round of the the android robot's dialogue, as detailed in Section III. Dialogue Robot Competition 2022 (DRC2022), an international Furthermore, as described in Section II-A, we designed the competition evaluating the performance of dialogue android robot to vary the way it interacted with users based robots [1], [2]. The objective of this year's competition was on their age, in order to create a positive impression.

POI recommendation is a key task in tourism information systems. However, in contrast to conventional point of interest (POI) recommender systems, the available data is extremely sparse; most tourist visit a few sightseeing spots once and most of these spots have no check-in data from new tourists. Most conventional systems rank sightseeing spots based on their popularity, reputations, and category-based similarities with users' preferences. They do not clarify what users can experience in these spots, which makes it difficult to meet diverse tourism needs. To this end, in this work, we propose a mechanism to recommend POIs to tourists. Our mechanism include two components: one is a probabilistic model that reveals the user behaviors in tourism; the other is a pseudo rating mechanism to handle the cold-start issue in POIs recommendations. We carried out extensive experiments with two datasets collected from Flickr. The experimental results demonstrate that our methods are superior to the state-of-the-art methods in both the recommendation performances (precision, recall and F-measure) and fairness. The experimental results also validate the robustness of the proposed methods, i.e., our methods can handle well the issue of data sparsity.

Mental State Transition Network which consists of mental states connected to each other is a basic concept of approximating to human psychological and mental responses. It can represent transition from an emotional state to other one with stimulus by calculating Emotion Generating Calculations method. A computer agent can transit a mental state in MSTN based on analysis of emotion by EGC method. In this paper, the Andorid EGC which the agent works in Android smartphone can evaluate the feelings in the conversation. The tourist navigation system with the proposed technique in this paper will be expected to be an emotional oriented interface in Android smartphone.