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Seminar: Simone Balloccu

Unaddressed challenges in persuasive dieting chatbots

Diet coaching gathered lots of interest in research. Recently, chatbots have been leveraged to address this task, with a focus on persuasion to motivate people towards behaviour change. In this talk we will take a look at current approaches in building persuasive dieting chatbots and expose a number of major unsolved challenges. We will motivate them with evidences from previous works and show that current chatbots don’t approach certain scenarios properly, hence limiting their communication and persuasion capabilities.

Simone Balloccu is a PhD student in Natural Language Generation (NLG) at the University of Aberdeen, UK. He received his BSc and MSc in computer science from the University of Cagliari. His research initially focused on unsupervised Natural Language Understanding (NLU) for the Singleton Expansion and Hypernym Discovery tasks. He is now working in the PhilHumans project (H2020) on the development of innovative healthcare AI technology. His current research focus is on user profiling, text comprehension enhancement and stress-based tailoring in the context of diet coaching.

When:  15/04/2021 at 10.00

Where: https://unito.webex.com/webappng/sites/unito/meeting/info/910eaf7ad0534d1ba92c5dde0a66a9a7