This explorative study investigated (a) whether social attraction, self-disclosure, interaction quality, intimacy, empathy and communicative competence play a role in getting-acquainted interaction...

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/0265407520959463

Can we be friends with Mitsuku? A longitudinal study on the process of relationship formation between humans and a social chatbot:

Advanced Topics in Information Resources Management

Berth scheduling can be described as the resource allocation problem of berth space to vessels in a container terminal. When defining the allocation of berths to vessels container terminal operators set several objectives which ideally need to be optimized simultaneously. These multiple objectives are often non-commensurable and gaining an improvement on one objective often causes degrading performance on the other objectives. In this paper, the authors present the application of a multi-objective decision and analysis approach to the berth scheduling problem, a resource allocation problem at container terminals. The proposed approach allows the port operator to efficiently select a subset of solutions over the entire solution space of berth schedules when multiple and conflicting objectives are involved. Results from extensive computational examples using real-world data show that the proposed approach is able to construct and select efficient berth schedules, is consistent, and can be used with confidence.

A Multi-Objective Decision and Analysis Approach for the Berth Scheduling Problem

Applications of chatbots are becoming more diverse. One application that is specifically interesting is social chatbots, as they are designed to provide its users with social support and improve wellbeing and mental health outcomes. It is questionable to what extent social chatbots are successful support providers, as there are several differences between chatbots and humans. Given the diverse subconcepts of social support, this paper aims to evaluate to what extent relevant subconcepts (structural support, perceived support, received support, and support adequacy) are captivated in extant research on social chatbots, in order to draw conclusions about its potential. Support adequacy turned out to be most under scrutiny in extant research, while measures of structural support and received support received less attention. Surprisingly, directionality of support was another important subconcept of social support in social chatbot literature. Theoretical and practical implications as well as suggestions for future research are discussed.

“I’m Here for You”: Can Social Chatbots Truly Support Their Users? A Literature Review

Advanced Topics in Information Resources Management, Volume 1

Conversational agents that display many human qualities have become a valuable method business uses to communicate with online users to supply services or products, to help in online order process or to search the Web. The gaming industry and education may benefit from this type of interface. In this type of chats, users could have different alternatives: text display, photo of a real person, or a cartoon drawing and others. This is an exploratory study that reviews five randomly chosen conversations that an animated chatbot has with Web users. The character simulates human gestures, but they are stylized to reproduce animation standards. The goal of this exploratory study is to provide feedback that will help designers to improve the functionality of the conversational agent, identify userâ€™s needs, define future research, and learn from previous errors. The methodology used was qualitative content analysis

Jaime Jimenez-Guzman

Papers

Social Interaction with a Conversational Agent: An Exploratory Study