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266 Selected Studies on Software and Information Systems
tunities for self-expression and self-disclosure, physical support, and reassurance of worth
and value. Different models of relationship were proposed.
In social exchange models, costs, benefits and investments in "relationship business" are
modeled (Burke, 2006), i.e. the perceived costs and benefits of providing and receiving
provisions respectively, and whether suitable alternatives are available affect the relationship's
duration. In dimensional models, features that characterize different stereotypical interactions
are used. (Svennevig, 1999) proposes an extension of earlier models into four dimensions
of relationship as follows:
1. Power. The person's ability to control the behavior of the other. Typically, occurs
when the distribution of rights and obligations resulting from the relationship roles is
asymmetric, e.g. institutional roles and positions.
2. Solidarity. The degree of like-mindedness, e.g. political membership, religion, gender,
birthplace. Rights and obligations are usually symmetrically distributed.
3. Familiarity. Mutual knowledge of personal information, i.e. breadth (number of topics)
and depth (public or private) of information disclosed.
4. Affect. Mutual attraction, i.e. the degree of liking for each other.
These dimensions are usually interrelated, though it needs not to be the case. For example,
high levels of solidarity based on group membership need not to elicit high levels of either
familiarity or affect, and pure affect arises in some situations (e.g. love at first sight).
People engage in different relational strategies for maintaining relationships. Five
strategic maintenance behaviors that are used intentionally to keep up the relationship were
identified (Haas, 2005): positivity (e.g. cheerfulness, positive comments), openness (e.g. selfdisclosure,
meta-relational communication), assurances (e.g. verbal or nonverbal expressions
of love and comfort), shared tasks (e.g. household duties), and social networks (e.g.
communicating with mutual friendships). In addition to these, different routine maintenance
behaviors that are regular or habitual behaviors that serve to maintain the relationship
were identified, such as joint activities, affection, avoidance of conflict, and focus on self
(e.g. watching weight, furthering career). Finally, people expect relationships to change
over time (Duck, 2007) i.e. the content, quality and diversity of interactions and activities
change, reciprocal behavior decreases and complementary behavior increases, among
others.
With language being the principal means for developing relationships, relational
agents need to implement the relational strategies outlined above in dialogues with their
users. Pioneering work in this area is the computational model of mixed social-and-task
dialogue addressing some of these strategies (Bickmore, 2003) evaluated within the REA
system in which an embodied conversational agent (ECA) performs the role of a real-estate
salesperson. Within this domain, the real-estate agent pursues several goals in parallel:
determining clients' housing preferences (e.g. size, location), establishing trust and reducing
clients' fear about such a big purchase, establishing agent's expertise and credibility.
Although REA has a fully articulated graphical body, senses the user through cameras and
microphones in real-time, and is capable of speech with intonation, facial display and gestural
output, it is her conversational properties that are interesting to us. Indeed, later in
evaluation it was found out that REA's nonverbal behavior was utterly insufficient (even
inappropriate), and specifically her conversational properties exhibited in a second phone-