Chatbots and communication: a qualitative analysis of communicative aspects of conversational interfaces

• Autor(a) principal: Francisco Albernaz Machado Valério
• Data de Publicação: 2020
• Tipo de documento: Dissertação
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Institucional da UFMG
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/1843/62392; https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7686-5447
• topic: Chatbots; Conversational Interfaces; Semiotic Engineering; Semiotic Inspection Method; Speech Acts; Computação – Teses; Chatbots – Teses; Engenharia Semiótica – Teses; Método de Inspeção Semiótica - Teses

Recently, text-based chatbots had a rise in popularity, possibly due to new APIs for online social networks and messenger services, and development platforms that help dealing with all the necessary Natural Language Processing. However, as chatbots mainly use natural language as interface, users may struggle to discover which sentences the chatbots will understand and what they can do. So it is important to support designers in deciding how to convey the chatbots' features, as this might determine whether the user will continue chatting or not. In this work, our goal is to analyze the communicative strategies used by popular chatbots when conveying their features to users. We used the Semiotic Inspection Method (SIM) for that end, and we were able to identify 11 strategies used by the analyzed chatbots for conveying their features to users. We then consolidated these findings by analyzing other ten chatbots. Later, we further analyzed the chatbot communication with an exploratory investigation of Pragmatics aspects of Speech Acts and Cooperative and Politeness Principles. We also conducted user studies comparing different approaches to chatbot design and the use of the previously identified strategies. Finally, we discuss the use of these strategies, challenges for designing such interfaces, limitations of using SIM and our methodology on them, and users' perception of different ways of interacting with chatbots and their communicative strategies.