Impression of a Job Interview training agent that gives rationalized feedback: Should Virtual Agent Give Advice with Rationale?

The COVID-19 pandemic has had a significant socio-economic impact on the world. Specifically, social distancing has impacted many activities that were previously conducted face-to-face. One of these was the training that students receive for job interviews. Thus, we developed a job interview training system that will give students the ability to continue receiving this type of training. Our system recognized the nonverbal behaviors of an interviewee, namely gaze, facial expression, and posture and compares the recognition results with those of models of exemplary nonverbal behaviors of an interviewee. A virtual agent acted as an advisor gives feedback on the interviewee's behaviors that need improvement. In order to verify the effectiveness of the two kinds of feedback, namely, rationalized feedback (with quantitative recognition results) vs. non-rationalized one, we compared interviewees’ impression. The results of the evaluation experiment indicated that the virtual agent with rationalized feedback was rated as more reliable but less friendly than the non-rationalized feedback.