This paper presents a dialogue act taxonomy designed for the developmentof a conversational agent for elderly. The main goal of this conversational agent is to improvelife quality of the user by means of coaching sessions in different topics. In contrast to otherapproaches such as task-oriented dialogue systems and chit-chat implementations, the agent shoulddisplay a pro-active attitude, driving the conversation to reach a number of diverse coachinggoals. Therefore, the main characteristic of the introduced dialogue act taxonomy is its capacityfor supporting a communication based on the GROW model for coaching. In addition, the taxonomyhas a hierarchical structure between the tags and it is multimodal. We use the taxonomy toannotate a Spanish dialogue corpus collected from a group of elder people. We also present apreliminary examination of the annotated corpus and discuss on the multiple possibilities it presentsfor further research.

The goal of active aging is to promote changes in the elderly community so as to maintain an active, independent and socially-engaged lifestyle. Technological advancements currently provide the necessary tools to foster and monitor such processes. This paper reports on mid-term achievements of the European H2020 EMPATHIC project, which aims to research, innovate, explore and validate new interaction paradigms and platforms for future generations of personalized virtual coaches to assist the elderly and their carers to reach the active aging goal, in the vicinity of their home. The project focuses on evidence-based, user-validated research and integration of intelligent technology, and context sensing methods through automatic voice, eye and facial analysis, integrated with visual and spoken dialogue system capabilities. In this paper, we describe the current status of the system, with a special emphasis on its components and their integration, the creation of a Wizard of Oz platform, and findings gained from user interaction studies conducted throughout the first 18 months of the project. CCS Concepts: • Human-centered computing → Interactive systems and tools; Empirical studies in HCI; Interaction techniques; • Applied computing → Health informatics.

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The conception of spoken-dialog systems (SDS) usually faces the problem of extending or adapting the system to multiple languages. This implies the creation of modules specically for the new languages, which is a time consuming process. In this paper, we propose two methods to reduce the time needed to extend the SDS to other languages. Our methods are particularly oriented to the topic classication and semantic tagging tasks and we evaluate their eectiveness on topic classication for three languages: English, Spanish, French. CCS CONCEPTS • Human-centered computing → Natural language interfaces; • Computing methodologies → Neural networks; Machine learning algorithms; • Applied computing → Document management and text processing.

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