Collaborative User Responses in Multiparty Interaction with a Couples Counselor Robot

Intimate relationships are integral parts of human societies, yet many relationships are in distress. Couples counseling has been shown to be effective in preventing and alleviating relationship distress, yet many couples do not seek professional help, due to cost, logistic, and discomfort in disclosing private problems. In this paper, we describe our efforts towards the development a fully automated couples counselor robot, and focus specifically on the problem of identifying and processing "collaborative responses", in which a human couple co-construct a response to a query from the robot. We present an analysis of collaborative responses obtained from a pilot study, then develop a data-driven model to detect end of collaborative responses for regulating turn taking during a counseling session. Our model uses a combination of multimodal features, and achieves an offline weighted F-score of 0.81. Finally, we present findings from a quasi-experimental study with a robot facilitating a counseling session to promote intimacy with romantic couples. Our findings suggest that the session improves couples intimacy and positive affect. An online evaluation of the end-of-collaborative-response model demonstrates an F-score of 0.72.