Second Workshop on Empirical Evaluation of Adaptive Systems

in conjunction with UM2003

Matessa, M. (2003). Measures of Adaptive Communication. In: Weibelzahl, S. and Paramythis, A. (eds.). Proceedings of the Second Workshop on Empirical Evaluation of Adaptive Systems, held at the 9th International Conference on User Modeling UM2003, Pittsburgh.

Adaptive communication has been theorized to be beneficial for the efficiency of tasks involving communication. This paper describes a study where accommodating simulated agents adapted to their human partners’ word choice and non-accommodating agents purposely chose different but equivalent words. Both agents adapted to message length, which, along with task completion time, was used as a dependent measure of efficiency. Human subjects paired with accommodating agents were shown to be more efficient than subjects paired with non-accommodating agents, and survey ratings of cooperativeness and ability were higher for the accommodating agents.