On and after the Great Eastern Japan Earthquake, various false information and rumor have been spread on Twitter. To cope with this, we proposed the method for automatically assessing the credibility of information based on the topic and opinion classification. The information credibility is assessed calculating the ratio of the positive opinions to all opinions about a topic. To identify the topic of a tweet, topic models are generated using Latent Dirichlet Allocation. To identify if an opinion of the tweet is positive or negative, sentiment analysis is performed using a semantic orientation dictionary. However, the accuracy of the method is susceptible to the number of tweets. That is to say, if the number of tweets with the same topic is small, the denominator is reduced. Thus the accuracy is also reduced. To cope with this problem, a new method of providing an expertise score is proposed. The score is used to calculate the information credibility depending on user's knowledge (expertise). This makes tweets of a user handled as a more reliable opinion even if it is a minor opinion.

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We present VICA, a Visual Counseling Agent designed to create an engaging multimedia face-to-face interaction. VICA 1 is a human-friendly agent equipped with high-performance voice conversation designed to help psychologically stressed users, to offload 2 their emotional burden. Such users specifically include non-computer-savvy elderly persons or clients. Our agent builds replies 3 exploiting interlocutor's utterances expressing such as wishes, obstacles, emotions, etc. Statements asking for confirmation, details, 4 emotional summary, or relations among such expressions are added to the utterances. We claim that VICA is suitable for positive 5 counseling scenarios where multimedia specifically high-performance voice communication is instrumental for even the old or digital 6 divided users to continue dialogue towards their self-awareness. To prove this claim, VICA's effect is evaluated with respect to a 7 previous text-based counseling agent CRECA and ELIZA including its successors. An experiment involving 14 subjects shows VICA 8 effects as follows: i) the dialogue continuation (CPS: Conversation-turns Per Session) of VICA for the older half (age >40) substantially 9 improved 53% to CRECA and 71% to ELIZA. ii) VICA's capability to foster peace of mind and other positive feelings was assessed 10 with a very high score of 5 or 6 mostly, out of 7 stages of the Likert scale, again by the older. Compared on average, such capability of 11 VICA for the older is 5.14 while CRECA (all subjects are young students, age<25) is 4.50, ELIZA is 3.50, and the best of ELIZA's 12 successors for the older (>25) is 4.41.13

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