Facilitating Social Messaging in Romantic Context with Computer Mediated Textual Manifestation

MPhil Thesis Defence


Title: "Facilitating Social Messaging in Romantic Context with Computer 
Mediated Textual Manifestation"

By

Mr. Taewook KIM



Abstract

Text messaging plays a vital role in developing and sustaining romantic 
relationships. While there would be various difficulties in communication 
between partners via text messaging, I focused on the two most common 
challenges in this thesis. First, continuing a good conversation is often 
challenging to achieve via text messages particularly with an unfamiliar person 
in potential romantic contexts. Secondly, affectionate communication, the 
conveyance of closeness, care, and fondness for another, is restrained in text 
messaging. Hence, this thesis explores the effects of two novel interactive 
systems designed to tackle these problems.

To facilitate continuing a good conversation, I first identified obstacles to 
keeping the conversational flow through a need-finding study with 14 people, 
with the primary issue being identifying proper topics as conversations unfold. 
Then I proposed a proof-of-concept prototype, Tomi that dynamically suggests 
conversation topic keywords based on incoming messages. It selects a seed from 
a sentence, then returns five relevant and extended topic keywords for each 
incoming message. In a qualitative study with 16 participants, users reported 
that suggestions not only boost their confidence but also mitigate burden 
during chatting. To handle the affectionate communication issue, I propose a 
novel interactive system Lily which gives users inspirations to enrich their 
romantic expressions in text messaging. It first listens to users' original 
input and then recommends romantic lyrics holding the closest meaning in 
real-time during chats with partners. After a three-day empirical study, 
participants who are real-life couples reported that they not only received 
useful cues from Lily in terms of how to polish their affectionate expressions 
but also learnt to enrich the conversation with topics enlightened by its 
recommendations. Finally, based on our findings from these two studies, I 
provided design considerations to enhance the quality of conversations in text 
messaging for developing and sustaining romantic relationships.


Date:  			Thursday, 30 July 2020

Time:			10:00am - 12:00noon

Zoom meeting:		https://hkust.zoom.us/j/96149312536

Committee Members:	Dr. Xiaojuan Ma (Supervisor)
  			Dr. Pan Hui (Chairperson)
 			Dr. Dongwon Lee (ISOM)


**** ALL are Welcome ****