Beyond calories: evaluating how tailored communication reduces emotional load in diet-coaching

Simone Balloccu; Ehud Reiter

doi:10.18653/v1/2022.humeval-1.5

Beyond calories: evaluating how tailored communication reduces emotional load in diet-coaching

Simone Balloccu, Ehud Reiter

Computing Science

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding › Published conference contribution

1 Citation (Scopus)

Abstract

Dieting is a behaviour change task that is difficult for many people to conduct successfully. This is due to many factors, including stress and cost. Mobile applications offer an alternative to traditional coaching. However, previous
work on apps evaluation only focused on dietary outcomes, ignoring users’ emotional state despite its influence on eating habits. In this work, we introduce a novel evaluation of the effects that tailored communication can have on the emotional load of dieting. We implement this by augmenting a traditional diet-app with affective NLG, text-tailoring and persuasive communication techniques. We then run a short 2-weeks experiment and check dietary outcomes, user feedback of produced text and, most importantly, its impact on emotional state, through PANAS questionnaire. Results show that tailored communication significantly improved users’ emotional state, compared to an
app-only control group.

Original language	English
Title of host publication	The 2nd Workshop on Human Evaluation of NLP Systems
Subtitle of host publication	Proceedings of the Workshop
Publisher	Association for Computational Linguists
Pages	42-53
Number of pages	12
ISBN (Electronic)	978-1-955917-38-4
DOIs	https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/2022.humeval-1.5
Publication status	Published - 27 May 2022
Event	The 2nd Workshop on Human Evaluation of NLP Systems - Dublin, Ireland Duration: 27 May 2022 → 27 May 2022 https://humeval.github.io/

Workshop

Workshop	The 2nd Workshop on Human Evaluation of NLP Systems
Abbreviated title	HumEval 2022
Country/Territory	Ireland
City	Dublin
Period	27/05/22 → 27/05/22
Internet address	https://humeval.github.io/

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Cite this

Balloccu, S & Reiter, E 2022, Beyond calories: evaluating how tailored communication reduces emotional load in diet-coaching. in The 2nd Workshop on Human Evaluation of NLP Systems: Proceedings of the Workshop. Association for Computational Linguists, pp. 42-53, The 2nd Workshop on Human Evaluation of NLP Systems, Dublin, Ireland, 27/05/22. https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/2022.humeval-1.5

@inproceedings{c1f1dac7567349a287e58b23bdc9c957,

title = "Beyond calories: evaluating how tailored communication reduces emotional load in diet-coaching",

abstract = "Dieting is a behaviour change task that is difficult for many people to conduct successfully. This is due to many factors, including stress and cost. Mobile applications offer an alternative to traditional coaching. However, previouswork on apps evaluation only focused on dietary outcomes, ignoring users{\textquoteright} emotional state despite its influence on eating habits. In this work, we introduce a novel evaluation of the effects that tailored communication can have on the emotional load of dieting. We implement this by augmenting a traditional diet-app with affective NLG, text-tailoring and persuasive communication techniques. We then run a short 2-weeks experiment and check dietary outcomes, user feedback of produced text and, most importantly, its impact on emotional state, through PANAS questionnaire. Results show that tailored communication significantly improved users{\textquoteright} emotional state, compared to anapp-only control group.",

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doi = "10.18653/v1/2022.humeval-1.5",

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N2 - Dieting is a behaviour change task that is difficult for many people to conduct successfully. This is due to many factors, including stress and cost. Mobile applications offer an alternative to traditional coaching. However, previouswork on apps evaluation only focused on dietary outcomes, ignoring users’ emotional state despite its influence on eating habits. In this work, we introduce a novel evaluation of the effects that tailored communication can have on the emotional load of dieting. We implement this by augmenting a traditional diet-app with affective NLG, text-tailoring and persuasive communication techniques. We then run a short 2-weeks experiment and check dietary outcomes, user feedback of produced text and, most importantly, its impact on emotional state, through PANAS questionnaire. Results show that tailored communication significantly improved users’ emotional state, compared to anapp-only control group.

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Beyond calories: evaluating how tailored communication reduces emotional load in diet-coaching

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Workshop

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