Papers

Foreign Language Learning (FLL) students commonly have few opportunities to use their target language. Teachers in FLL situations do their best to create opportunities during classes through pair or group work, but a variety of factors ranging from a lack of time to shyness or limited opportunity for quality feedback hamper this. This paper discusses online chatbots' potential role in fulfilling this need. Chatbots could provide a means of language practice for students... Read more

Artificial linguistic Internet computer entity, A.L.I.C.E. is considered head and shoulders above other artificial conversational entities, an ACE in digitaland. Three times winner of Loebner’s annual instantiation of Turing’s Test for machine intelligence in 2000, 2001 and 2004 judged most human-like machine, A.L.I.C.E. was additionally gold medal champion in 2004, for most knowledgeable programme in Chatterbox Challenge and won bronze medal for most popular ACE. As a modern Eliza, A.L.I.C.E appears as a dark-haired, blue-eyed... Read more

In this paper, we describe a framework for similarity based retrieval and clustering from a 3D human database. Our technique is based on both body and head shape representation and the retrieval is based on similarity of both of them. The 3D human database used in our study is the CAESAR anthropometric database which contains approximately 5000 bodies. We have developed a webbased interface for specifying the queries to interact with the retrieval system. Our... Read more

I claim that achieving real human-level artificial intelligence would necessarily imply that most of the tasks that humans perform for pay could be automated. Rather than work toward this goal of automation by building special-purpose systems, I argue for the development of general-purpose, educable systems that can learn and be taught to perform any of the thousands of jobs that humans can perform. Joining others who have made similar proposals, I advocate beginning with a... Read more

"Narrative" is one of key words in the modern society. Giddens pointed out a central role of narratives of the self in some literatures on self-actualization in the late modern society. Kobayashi claimed that there are increasing people trying to write life histories of themselves, and industries aiming at satisfying demand of these people like manuals for making narratives of selves, publishers, and so on, called "narrative industries", have appeared. There is a possibility that... Read more

This paper argues that social intelligence is a critical component of any conversational agent. Conversational interfaces with a sense of social identity circumvent several of problems that commonly arise, and such agents can promote ease-of-use, encourage engagement, and naturally set limits. The paper explores these issues by retrospectively analysing two sets of wizard-of-Oz experiments in the light of the social intelligence concept. In these experiments, the wizards employed simple social strategies to deal with ‘difficult’... Read more

The number of intelligent agents has grown rapidly in the last decade. Communication between user and computer can still be improved thanks to many advanced features of intelligent agents. Virtual assistants, present in e-commerce models, prove to be promising tools for a fruitful cooperation among computer-users. This paper outlines strengths and weaknesses of the intelligent agents according to the Human-Computer Interaction aspect. On the basis of this paper the following slides Intelligent Agents in the Human-Computer... Read more

Human machine conversation as a technology integrates different areas where the core is language, and the computational methodologies facilitate communication between users and computers using natural language. A related term to machine conversation is the chatbot, a conversational agent that interacts with users turn by turn using natural language. Different chatbots or human-computer dialogue systems have been developed using text communication starting from ELIZA that simulates a psychotherapist, then PARRY which simulates a paranoid patient. Read more

This research investigates the meaning of ‘human-computer relationship’ and presents techniques for constructing, maintaining, and evaluating such relationships, based on research in social psychology, sociolinguistics, communication and other social sciences. Contexts in which relationships are particularly important are described, together with specific benefits (like trust) and task outcomes (like improved learning) known to be associated with relationship quality. We especially consider the problem of designing for longterm interaction, and define relational agents as computational... Read more

This paper presents the mechanisms proposed by a generic cognitive architecture for virtual characters with emotional influenced behaviors, called cognitiva, to maintain behavior control at will without giving up the richness provided by emotions. This architecture, together with a progressive specification process for its application, have been used successfully to model 3D intelligent virtual actors for virtual storytelling. Read more