Who’s that? - Social situation awareness for behaviour support agents: A feasibility study

Behaviour support agents need to be aware of the social environment of the user in order to be able to provide comprehensive support. However, this is a feature that is currently lacking in existing systems. To tackle it, first of all we explore literature from social sciences in order to find which elements of the social environment need to be represented. We structure this knowledge as a two-level ontology that models social situations. We formalize the elements that are needed to model social situations, which consist of different types of meetings between two people. We conduct an experiment to evaluate the lower level of the ontology using feedback from the subjects, and to test whether we can use the data to reason about the priority of different situations. Subjects found our proposed features of social relationships to be understandable and representative. Furthermore, we show these features can be combined in a decision tree to predict the priority of social situations.