Alexander Dregger

Description:

Currently, research is discussing the shaping of personality traits in conversational agents such as chatbots (e.g. Ahmad et al., 2022; Völkel, 2021). However, previous publications show that certain personality dimensions such as openness have been little studied with regard to their shaping with the help of linguistic cues in conversational agents such as chatbots. The aim would be to carry out a proposal for the systematic design of such a dimension and to validate its user effect in an experimental scenario.

The thesis should pursue the following goals:

• Literature review on personality dimension X (e.g. honesty and humor) and its design
• Development of suggestions for the design of this feature with the help of linguistic signals (e.g. type of word choice)
• Validation of the design suggestions using an initial experimental study in which users interact with a conversational agent
• Reporting and discussion of the results

What you bring with you:

• You are studying computer science, business informatics, industrial engineering, economics or a comparable course of study
• You are interested in UX and the design of conversational agents
• You enjoy working independently
• Ideally, you have basic knowledge of literature research
• Ideally, you have basic knowledge in the construction of questionnaires
• You have a very good command of written and spoken German and English
• You have basic knowledge of statistics and relevant software, e.g. R or SPSS
• You are motivated and committed

What we offer you:

• Motivated and competent support is important to us. For us, this includes taking enough time for you and supporting you with helpful feedback.
• You will gain exciting insights into interdisciplinary research topics.
• The thesis can be written in both English and German.
• You can organize the implementation flexibly (working hours, remote)
• Have we piqued your interest? Then send us your application.
• We look forward to getting to know you!

Alexander Dregger, M.Sc. (dregger@fzi.de), phone: +49 721 9654-659, will be happy to answer any technical questions you may have about the position.

Introductory literature:

• Ahmad, R., Siemon, D., Gnewuch, U. & Robra-Bissantz, S. (2022). A Framework of Personality Cues for Conversational Agents. In T. Bui (Ed.), Proceedings of the Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences, Proceedings of the 55th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences. Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences. https://doi.org/10.24251/HICSS.2022.524
• Dregger, A. (2023). More than Big Five? Towards Modeling and Defining Artificial Personality for Conversational Agents. 7th International Workshop on Chatbot Research (Conversations 2023), Oslo.
• Dregger, A., Seifermann, M., & Oberweis, A. (2024). Language Cues for Expressing Artificial Personality: A Systematic Literature Review for Conversational Agents. ACM Conversational User Interfaces 2024, 1-17. https://doi.org/10.1145/3640794.3665559
• Völkel, S. T., & Kaya, L. (2021). Examining User Preference for Agreeableness in Chatbots. CUI 2021 - 3rd Conference on Conversational User Interfaces, 1-6. https://doi.org/10.1145/3469595.3469633
• Völkel, S. T., Schödel, R., Buschek, D., Stachl, C., Winterhalter, V., Bühner, M., & Hussmann, H. (2020). Developing a Personality Model for Speech-based Conversational Agents Using the Psycholexical Approach. Proceedings of the 2020 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 1-14. https://doi.org/10.1145/3313831.3376210