Towards the Embodied Conversational Interview Agentic Service ELIAS: Development and Evaluation of a First Prototype
Type
conference paper
Date Issued
2025-06-12
Author(s)
Abstract
Interviews in social and health sciences are resource intensive and susceptible to interviewer bias, inconsistency, and variability across interviewers. Moreover, human-led interviews may inhibit participant openness, especially regarding sensitive topics, due to judgment, compromised anonymity, or discomfort in face-to-face interactions. These shortcomings limit the quality of the data collected. To this end, we propose the Embodied Conversational Interview Agentic Service (ELIAS). Informed by human-developed interview guides, ELIAS aims to streamline the interview process by combining an empathetic and bias-free embodied conversational interview agent with a semi-supervised content analysis and coding agent. We describe the development of the first version of ELIAS and also present results from a first evaluation study with five participants. We assessed the acceptance of and alliance with the embodied conversational interview agent. The evaluation shows positive perceptions and a strong alliance with the conversational agent. Suggestions for improvement will guide our future work.
Publisher
ACM
Start page
420
End page
424
Event Title
Adjunct Proceedings of the 33rd ACM Conference on User Modeling, Adaptation and Personalization
Event Location
New York