Analyzing How a Talk Show Host Performs Follow-Up Questions for Developing an Interview Agent

This paper aims to reveal how human experts delve into the topics of a conversation and to apply such strategies in developing an interview agent. The purpose of recent studies on chat-oriented dialogue systems has centered around how to respond in conversation to a wide variety of topics. However, in interviews, it is also important to delve into particular topics to deepen the conversation. Since interviewers in talk shows, such as talk show hosts, are considered to be proficient at such skills, in this paper we analyze how a talk show host interviews her guests in a TV program and thus reveal the strategies used to delve into specific topics. In particular, we focus on follow-up questions and analyze the kinds of follow-up questions used. We also develop a prediction model that judges whether the next utterance should be a follow-up question and then evaluate the model’s performance.