Towards mutual theory of mind in human-ai interaction: How language reflects what students perceive about a virtual teaching assistant

Qiaosi Wang, Koustuv Saha, Eric Gregori, David A. Joyner, Ashok K. Goel

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

Abstract

Building conversational agents that can conduct natural and prolonged conversations has been a major technical and design challenge, especially for community-facing conversational agents. We posit Mutual Theory of Mind as a theoretical framework to design for natural long-term human-AI interactions. From this perspective, we explore a community's perception of a question-answering conversational agent through self-reported surveys and computational linguistic approach in the context of online education. We frst examine long-term temporal changes in students' perception of Jill Watson (JW), a virtual teaching assistant deployed in an online class discussion forum. We then explore the feasibility of inferring students' perceptions of JW through linguistic features extracted from student-JW dialogues.We fnd that students' perception of JW's anthropomorphism and intelligence changed signifcantly over time. Regression analyses reveal that linguistic verbosity, readability, sentiment, diversity, and adaptability refect student perception of JW. We discuss implications for building adaptive community-facing conversational agents as long-term companions and designing towards Mutual Theory of Mind in human-AI interaction.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Title of host publicationCHI 2021 - Proceedings of the 2021 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
Subtitle of host publicationMaking Waves, Combining Strengths
PublisherAssociation for Computing Machinery
ISBN (Electronic)9781450380966
DOIs
StatePublished - May 6 2021
Externally publishedYes
Event2021 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems: Making Waves, Combining Strengths, CHI 2021 - Virtual, Online, Japan
Duration: May 8 2021May 13 2021

Publication series

NameConference on Human Factors in Computing Systems - Proceedings

Conference

Conference2021 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems: Making Waves, Combining Strengths, CHI 2021
Country/TerritoryJapan
CityVirtual, Online
Period5/8/215/13/21

Keywords

  • Conversational agent
  • Human-ai interaction
  • Language analysis
  • Online community
  • Online education
  • Theory of mind

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Human-Computer Interaction
  • Computer Graphics and Computer-Aided Design
  • Software

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