For my master thesis I am working on a dialogue system that should be deployed in hospitals to administer simple questionnaires to patients. I already did literature research and I'm fine with what I found since I don't have to replicate something which has been already done, but I noticed that there are really few papers regarding this specific 'robot interviewer' topic.
Let me explain the task a bit more in details: in a real interview a human interviewer usually starts with greetings and with an explanation of the questionnaire to administer, and then he/she starts asking some more or less structured questions to the person to interview. The idea here is to replace a human interviewer with a dialogue system.
Now, at a first glimpse it seems like a task that can be easily hand coded, and indeed lot of real application simply use systems in which specific questions are stored in memory in association with some already made answers to choose from (here's an example), and the system simply show them (or read in the case of humanoid robots) to the people being interviewed, the system then wait for the answer and then move on with the next questions.
The point is that in real interviews the conversation flow is obviously much more smooth and natural. A human being can detect doubts in the voice of the interviewed person, which can also explicitly ask for explanations, a human being can also understand when an answer comes with emotional implications ('yes I feel sad every day') and we are able to automatically react to these hidden implications with emotional fillers ('I'm sorry to hear that'). All these aspects require to train some natural language understanding module in order to be replicated in an artificial agent (and this is actually what I'm currently working on), so I though I would have found more papers on this.
Now, despite having found a tons of paper related to open domain dialogue systems, affective and attentive systems, even systems able to reply with irony, I did not found many papers about dialogue systems for smooth interviews or questionnaire administration, which in my opinion sounds like an much easier task to tackle (especially if compared to open domain conversations). The only two papers that I found which truly focused on interviewer systems are:
SimSensei Kiosk: A Virtual Human Interviewer for Healthcare Decision Support
A job interview dialogue system with autonomous android ERICA
So my question is: did I miss something, like some specific keywords? Or is there actually a gap in the literature with regard to the design of dialogue systems for interviews and questionnaire (or surveys) administration? I'm interested in any link or hint from anyone working on similar applicants, thank you in advance!