Proactive information supply for activating conversational interaction in virtual communities

This paper describes a method for activating conversational interaction in virtual communities. Our method supplies information proactively to promote utterances of participants. The notion of subjective usefulness of information is introduced to guide conversation effectively so that the participants can obtain or exchange useful information. We implemented an agent that employs our method and conducted the experiments to verify validity of our method. As a result, we found that our method was able to activate conversational interaction and assist participants in obtaining or exchanging useful information.