Look Who’s Talking
Towards Engaging Long-Term Interactions with Conversational Agents
About Our Project
Look Who’s Talking is an interdisciplinary collaboration between three universities from the Netherlands, funded by the Dutch Research Council (NWO), working together to develop and test a new generation of conversational agents (chatbots) which can engage with humans in long-term motivational interactions. The main aim of this project is to create and field-test chatbots designed to develop and foster long-term engaging and human-like conversations with humans for two technologically and linguistically diverse domains (smoking cessation and promotion of safe sex, respectively) based on recent insights from artificial intelligence, computational linguistics, humanities, and social sciences with expertise from our societal partners. Additionally, we will study if and how people build up a social relationship with such more advanced chatbots, and what the ethical implications of communication with such health chatbots are.
Chatbots & Software
Roby the smoking cessation bot
Roby’s main function is getting to know smokers’ behaviour by a conversational assessment. It also provides personalized normative feedback and discusses with smokers potential reasons to quit smoking. We “trained” Roby with motivational interviewing techniques and skills, to be a helpful addition in motivating smokers to quit!
MISH the sexual health bot
MISH is a text-based conversational agent that primarily makes use of motivational interviewing (MI) techniques to promote sexual health. This prototype has been designed to address condom use. While the intended target population is heterosexual couples in a steady relationship, initial testing will be conducted with individuals.
HyLECA development framework
HyLECA is an open-source framework designed for the development of long-term engaging controlled conversational agents. HyLECA’s dialogue manager employs a hybrid architecture, combining rule-based methods for controlled dialogue flows with retrieval-based and generation-based approaches to enhance the utterance variability and flexibility.
Publications
2025
Chatting your way to quitting: A longitudinal exploration of smokers’ interaction with a cessation chatbot. He, L., Basar, E., Wiers, R., Antheunis, M., & Krahmer, E. (2025). In Internet Interventions, 39, 100806. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.invent.2025.100806
How Well Can Large Language Models Reflect? A Human Evaluation of LLM-generated Reflections for Motivational Interviewing Dialogues. Basar, E., Sun, X., Hendrickx, I., de Wit, J., Bosse, T., de Bruijn, G., Bosch, J. & Krahmer, E. (2025). In Proceedings of the 31st International Conference on Computational Linguistics (pp. 1964-1982). ACL. https://aclanthology.org/2025.coling-main.135/
2024
To What Extent Are Large Language Models Capable of Generating Substantial Reflections for Motivational Interviewing Counseling Chatbots? A Human Evaluation. Basar, E., Hendrickx, I., Krahmer, E., de Bruijn, G., & Bosse, T. (2024). In Proceedings of the 1st Human-Centered Large Language Modeling Workshop at ACL2024 (pp. 41-52). ACL. https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/2024.hucllm-1.4
Effectiveness and user experience of a smoking cessation chatbot: A mixed-methods study comparing motivational interviewing and confrontational counseling. He, L., Basar, E., Krahmer, E., Wiers, R., & Antheunis, M. (2024). In Journal of Medical Internet Research, 26, e53134. https://doi.org/10.2196/53134
Exploring User Engagement Through an Interaction Lens: What Textual Cues Can Tell Us about Human-Chatbot Interactions. He, L., Braggar, A., Basar, E., Krahmer, E., Antheunis, M., & Bosse, T. (2024). In Proceedings of the 6th ACM Conference on Conversational User Interfaces. ACM. https://doi.org/10.1145/3640794.3665536
Designing a Couples-Based Conversational Agent to Promote Safe Sex in New, Young Couples: A User-Centred Design Approach. Balaji, D., de Bruijn, G. J., Bosse, T., Ischen, C., van der Goot, M., & Wiers, R. (2024). In Proceedings of the 6th ACM Conference on Conversational User Interfaces. ACM. https://doi.org/10.1145/3640794.3665556
2023
HyLECA: A Framework for Developing Hybrid Long-term Engaging Controlled Conversational Agents. Basar, E., Balaji, D., He, L., Hendrickx, I., Krahmer, E., de Bruijn, G., & Bosse, T. (2023). In Proceedings of the 5th ACM Conference on Conversational User Interfaces. ACM. https://doi.org/10.1145/3571884.3604404
2022
Effectiveness and acceptability of conversational agents for smoking cessation: a systematic review and meta-analysis. He, L., Balaji, D., Wiers, R. W., Antheunis, M. L., & Krahmer, E. (2022). In Nicotine & Tobacco Research, 25(7):1241–1250. https://doi.org/10.1093/ntr/ntac281
Effectiveness and acceptability of conversational agents for sexual health promotion: a systematic review and meta-analysis. Balaji, D., He, L., Giani, S., Bosse, T., Wiers, R., & de Bruijn, G. J. (2022). In Sexual Health, 19(5), 391-405. https://doi.org/10.1071/SH22016
Can chatbots help to motivate smoking cessation? A study on the effectiveness of motivational interviewing on engagement and therapeutic alliance. He, L., Basar, E., Wiers, R. W., Antheunis, M., & Krahmer, E. (2022). In BMC Public Health, 22(1), 726. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12889-022-13115-x
Hints of Independence in a Pre-scripted World: On Controlled Usage of Open-domain Language Models for Chatbots in Highly Sensitive Domains. Basar, E., Hendrickx, I., Krahmer, E., de Bruijn, G., & Bosse, T. (2022). In Proceedings of the 14th International Conference on Agents and Artificial Intelligence – Volume 1 (pp. 401-407). SciTePress. https://doi.org/10.5220/0010914300003116
Hi, I’m Cecil(y) the Smoking Cessation Chatbot: The Effectiveness of Motivational Interviewing and Confrontational Counseling Chatbots and the Moderating Role of the Need for Autonomy and Self-Efficacy. Leeuwis, L. & He, L. (2022). In International Workshop on Chatbot Research and Design (pp. 3-17). Springer International Publishing. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-25581-6_1
2021
Towards a new generation of personalized intelligent conversational agents. Hendrickx, I., Cena, F., Basar, E., Di Caro, L., Kunneman, F., Musi, E., Musto, C., Rapp, A. & van Waterschoot, J. (2021). In Adjunct Proceedings of the 29th ACM Conference on User Modeling, Adaptation and Personalization (pp. 373-374). ACM. https://doi.org/10.1145/3450614.3461453.
Our Team
Look Who’s Talking research group consists of many experts from multiple disciplines assuming different roles in our project.
Supervisory Team
Prof. Dr. Tibor Bosse
Radboud University
Social artificial intelligence,
theory of mind
Prof. Dr. Gert-Jan de Bruijn
University of Antwerp
Health technology,
behaviour change
Prof. Dr. Emiel Krahmer
Tilburg University
Human-machine interaction, natural language processing, conversational agents, evaluation
Prof. Dr. Marjolijn Antheunis
Tilburg University
Computer-mediated communication
Dr. Margot van der Goot
University of Amsterdam
Human-machine communication,
conversational agents
Dr. Iris Hendrickx
Radboud University
Natural language processing,
conversational agents
Dr. Carolin Ischen
University of Amsterdam
Human-machine communication, conversational agents
Prof. Dr. Reinout Wiers
University of Amsterdam
Developmental psychopathology,
cognitive processes in addiction, intervention development
Prof. Dr. Pim Haselager
Radboud University
Philosophy of mind,
applied ethics
PhD Candidates
Divyaa Balaji, M.Sc.
University of Amsterdam
Human Factors
Focus on communication about promoting safe sex behaviour
Erkan Basar, M.Sc.
Radboud University
Artificial Intelligence
Focus on computational dialogue modelling
Linwei He, M.Sc.
Tilburg University
Health Communication
Focus on communication about smoking cessation
Societal & Industrial Partners
Drs. Erwin Fisser
SOA Aids Nederland
Societal partner; safe sex promotion
Prof. Dr. Marc Willemsen
Trimbos Instituut
Societal partner; smoking cessation and public health
Dr. Sander Wubben
Flow.ai
Industrial partner; practical design of chatbots
Collaborating Experts
Prof. Dr. Elisabeth Andre
Augsburg University
Computational dialogue modelling
Prof. Dr. Ehud Reiter
University of Aberdeen
Natural language generation
Prof. Dr. Rob Ruiter
Maastricht University
Health communication and health promotion
Prof. Dr. Robert West
University College London
Addiction and behaviour change
Our Partners
This project is partly financed by the Dutch Research Council (NWO) with project number 406.DI.19.054
Get in touch
If you have any questions or just want to say hello, please don’t hesitate to contact us.