In future, could the secret service be selected by robot? (Image: Larry Downing/Reuters/Corbis)

Want access to the US government’s secrets? Talk to the robot.

Some 5.1 million Americans hold federal security clearance of one level or another, entitling them access to classified information. Putting each person eligible for clearance through the detailed screening process is a huge bureaucratic headache.

Dean Pollina of the US National Center for Credibility Assessment in Fort Jackson, South Carolina – which assesses security technologies such as polygraph lie detectors for the government – wondered whether a computer-generated interviewer could streamline the process.


Pollina and colleague Allison Baretta built a system in which an on-screen avatar equipped with speech-recognition capability asks a series of screening questions. They then used it to do recorded interviews with 120 members of the US Army.

What they found was surprising. Writing in the journal Computers in Human Behavior, the researchers say that candidates were much more likely to admit to having had mental health issues, using illicit drugs or drinking alcohol in a session with the ‘chatbot’ than in a written security screening questionnaire. They also revealed criminal acts from their past to the chatbot but not in the questionnaire.

Robot and being frank

The researchers say their results prove that national security interviews can be conducted by a computer-generated agent. Ehsan Hoque, who works on chatbots at the University of Rochester in New York, isn’t so sure.

“As a scientist, I love the overall promise of their findings, which are consistent with what we know about animated characters and the future we predict for them,” he says.

But he argues that it is hard to tell from the experiment whether interviewees were really responding to the chatbot or whether they were merely afraid of being recorded. “It would have been better if the authors had another condition where participants would simply respond to questions from a blank screen and be recorded. That would have helped us to see the exact effect of using a computer-generated agent versus just being recorded.”

Journal reference: Computers in Human Behavior, DOI: 10.1016/j.chb.2014.06.010