Chat-type Manzai Application: Mobile Daily Comedy Presentations based on Automatically Generated Manzai Scenarios Kazuki Haraguchi Kazuki Yane Akira Sato Konan University Konan University Osaka International Cancer Institute Kobe, Japan Kobe, Japan Osaka, Japan [email protected] Eiji Aramaki Isao Miyashiro Akiyo Nadamoto Nara Institute of Science and Osaka International Cancer Institute Konan University Technology Osaka, Japan Kobe, Japan Nara, Japan [email protected] ABSTRACT Multimedia (MoMM ’20), November 30-December 2, 2020, Chiang Mai, Thai- We have proposed and demonstrate Manzai robots that automati- land. ACM, New York, NY, USA, 10 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3428690. 3429170 cally generate Manzai scenarios. Manzai is a Japanese traditional comedy consisting of two comedians with funny dialogues like stand up comedy. Our Manzai robots are a huge system, but it is 1 INTRODUCTION not easy for users to watch Manzai every day using our Manzai We have proposed Manzai robots, which perform Manzai based on robots. As described herein, we propose a mobile style of presenting automatically generated Manzai dialogue based on AI techniques[7][1]. our automatically generated Manzai anytime and anywhere using Manzai, a Japanese traditional comedy, consists of two comedians a web application. We designate the application as a Chat-type with funny dialogue like stand up comedy. With our Manzai robot Manzai Application. The Chat-type Manzai Application is intended system, two robots perform the Manzai that we generate automati- to make people healthier by laughing as they relax and watch the cally. The generated Manzai scenario consists of funny dialogue for Manzai. However, the Chat-type Manzai Application loses direction. two robots. We have Manzai robots of two types: large and small. Therefore, we propose a new dialogue component: the Name list The large robot is about 1 m tall. The small robot is about 30 cm component. We used experiments of three types to measure the tall. Our Manzai robots consist of two robots, requiring much space benefits of our proposed application and component. to perform the Manzai. Robots are familiar to people. However, because of the Manzai robot size, watching Manzai is not always CCS CONCEPTS easy, especially for people who are hospitalized or receiving home • Information systems ! Web applications; • Applied comput- care. ing ! Health care information systems; • Human-centered com- By particularly addressing laughter, Nobori[10] proposes that puting ! Human computer interaction (HCI). laughter affects both the respiratory physiology and psychiatric and neurological immunology. Patch Adams, a famous American doctor, KEYWORDS proposed HospitalClown, which provides laughter to patients to support care for their health. In this way, the laughter supports Web application, comedy, Manzai, mental health care, dialogue health care. However, people who provide laughter such as Hospi- genaration, scenario talClown are less. Therefore, we consider that we should provide ACM Reference Format: our Manzai robots anytime and anywhere. People can watch our Kazuki Haraguchi, Kazuki Yane, Akira Sato, Eiji Aramaki, Isao Miyashiro, generated Manzai and becomes healthier. Nevertheless, our Manzai and Akiyo Nadamoto. 2020. Chat-type Manzai Application: Mobile Daily robots are huge. Therefore, is not easy for users to watch Manzai Comedy Presentations based on Automatically Generated Manzai Scenarios. anytime and anywhere. We infer that we should develop a system In The 18th International Conference on Advances in Mobile Computing and that allows easy watching of Manzai daily. Therefore, we specif- ically examined mobile devices such as smartphones and tablet terminals, which are pervasive in people’s daily life. For this study, Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed we propose a web-based application system by which users can for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation easily watch Manzai daily on a smartphone and tablet terminal. on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM Specifically, we propose a chat-type web application with balloons must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a of images of two characters using automatic generation of a Manzai fee. Request permissions from [email protected]. script that has been used with Manzai robots. We designate the MoMM ’20, November 30-December 2, 2020, Chiang Mai, Thailand system as a “Chat-type Manzai Application". In this way, users © 2020 Association for Computing Machinery. ACM ISBN 978-1-4503-8924-2/20/11...$15.00 can watch generated Manzai easily and daily using the Chat-type https://doi.org/10.1145/3428690.3429170 Manzai Application. MoMM ’20, November 30-December 2, 2020, Chiang Mai, Thailand Kazuki Haraguchi, Kazuki Yane, Akira Sato, Eiji Aramaki, Isao Miyashiro, and Akiyo Nadamoto. In general, Manzai is important not only for the comedian dia- performing comedy in real environments. They conducted robot logue but also the comedian direction such as movements. With joke-telling timing markedly improved the audience response. Kat- Manzai robots, we are directed by the robot movements. When we evas et al.[4] performed stand-up comedy use by humanoid robots. developed the Chat-type Manzai Application, we lost some aspects They demonstrated the manner in which humanoid robot can be of orientation. Therefore, we propose a new dialogue component useful to probe the complex social signals that contribute to the live to compensate for that lost aspect of orientation. performance experience. For this study, we specifically examined a As described herein, we contribute the following three points. more understandable and funny Manzai scenario, and assessed a • Proposing a new dialogue component for the Manzai sce- new style to watch an automatically generated Manzai scenario. nario. Numerous studies have assessed mental health care using robots. • Proposing a Chat-type Manzai Application. Shibata et al.[11] described robot therapy, which is mental health • Experiments conducted to measure benefits of the Chat- care using animal-type robots, using the seal-type mental com- type Manzai Application for fun and impressions based on mitment robot Palo, which aims to enrich daily life and heal peo- comparison with Manzai robots. ple’s minds. Wagemaker et al.[16] experimented with robot-based animal-assisted therapy. They show that it has no clear benefi- This paper is organized as follows: Section 2 presents discus- cial effect, but that positive interactions with the robot canbeof sion of related work. Section 3 includes a description of the Basic therapeutic value in itself. As described herein, we aim to care for concept of Manzai. Section 4 proposes a new dialogue component people’s minds by inducing emotions of laughter using robots and called the “Name list component”. Section 5 proposes the Chat-type applications to watch automatically generated Manzai scenarios. Manzai Application. Section 6 presents experiments. Finally, section 7 presents conclusions of this paper. 3 BASIC CONCEPT 2 RELATED WORK 3.1 What is Manzai? Numerous studies have presented dialogue generation. Chen et Manzai, a Japanese traditional comedy, usually poses a character al.[2] proposed Hierarchical Variational Memory Network called duo engaged in humorous dialogue. Manzai generally consists of HVMN, which uses a hierarchical structure and a variational mem- two roles: boke and tsukkomi. Boke states a misunderstanding, a ory network with a neural encoder–decoder network. Zhao et funny remark or a joke, which elicits laughter from the audience. al.[18] proposed pre-training based multiple knowledge syncretic Tsukkomi then points out mistakes and misunderstandings made transformer using one framework to integrate knowledge informa- by the boke and provides opportunities for humor. tion of multiple. Tuan et al.[14] proposed StepGAN, for which the In our system, when a user inputs keywords, the system creates discriminator is modified for automatic assignment scores, quan- a Manzai scenario based on web news related to a keyword. There tifying the goodness of a generated sub-sequence. Zhou et al.[19] are three parts of the act: the introduction, body, and conclusion. proposed the nCG-ESM system, which is sufficiently flexible to In this time, web news usually has bad news, such as incidents and allow extension to situations involving a broader range of emotions. accidents. The bad news should not be used for Manzai because Nie et al.[9] proposed a multimodal dialog system with adaptive de- Manzai is comedy. We set stop words such as "death" and "disaster" coders to generate general responses, knowledge-aware responses, to prevent generation of an inappropriate Manzai scenario. Such and multimodal responses dynamically. This study examines a dif- subjects are seldom the subject of humor of any kind. ferent approach by which we particularly examine Manzai. Numerous studies have presented Manzai. Tsutsumi [13] con- 3.1.1 Introduction part. The Introduction is an important part of ducted a conversation analysis of “boke-tsukkomi” in Manzai. Ad- Manzai. It consists of greetings and getting the first laugh. In the ditionally, he conducted experiments showing English speakers the conventional method, greetings are exchanged in keeping with the Manzai translated to English and showed that laughter was trans- season. However, this greeting is unable to play the role of the mitted to English speakers with the translated Manzai. Hayashi et Introduction part because the same greeting is made each time. al.[3] proposed a Robot Manzai system using a pair of robots as a As described herein, we propose the greeting of the day as a new passive social medium. They conducted a comparison between the Introduction part. For this Introduction part, we obtain information “passive medium” and “passive social medium”.