Papers

This paper extends our previous work which demonstrated that social dialogue can have a significant impact on a user's trust of an ECA, by investigating whether these results hold in the absence of nonverbal cues. We present the results of a study designed to determine whether the psychological effects of social dialogue – namely to increase trust and associated positive evaluations - vary when the nonverbal cues provided by the embodied conversational agent are... Read more

Two key objectives of conversational case-based reasoning (CCBR) systems are (1) eliciting case facts in a manner that minimizes the user's burden in terms of resources such as time, information cost, and cognitive load, and (2) integrating CBR with other problem solving modalities. This paper proposes an architecture that addresses both these goals by integrating CBR with a discourse-oriented dialogue engine. The dialogue engine determines when CBR or other problem-solving techniques are needed to achieve pending discourse... Read more

Chatterbots are computer programs that simulate intelligent conversation. They make use of various techniques such as pattern matching, indexing, sentence reconstruction, and even natural language processing. In this paper we present an approach to chatterbots that mixes pattern matching with indexing and query matching methods inspired by information retrieval. We propose a model in which new sentences can be produced from existing ones using an evolutionary algorithm adapted to the structure of the natural language. Read more

This final evaluation report describes evaluation studies that have been carried out on various aspects of embodied agents. Read more

Research about interactive characters suggests substantial opportunities for them to enhance online experiences. Automated characters take advantage of social responses that are natural reactions to interactive media. They can be perceived as realistic and well- liked social partners in conversations that simulate real-world interactions. Characters can express social roles, emotions, and organized personalities that match learning goals, company brands, and transaction needs. Characters can increase the trust that users place in online experiences, in part... Read more

Conversational user interfaces allow various natural communication modes like speech, gestures and facial expressions for input as well as output and exploit the context in which an input is used to compute its meaning. The growing emphasis on conversational user interfaces is fundamentally inspired by the aim to support natural, flexible, efficient and powerfully expressive means of human-computer communication that are easy to learn and use. Advances in human language technology and intelligent user interfaces... Read more

Conversational agents integrate computational linguistics techniques with the communication channel of the Web to interpret and respond to statements made by users in ordinary natural language. Web-based conversational agents deliver high-volumes of interactive text-based dialogs. Recent years have seen significant activity in enterprise-class conversational agents. This chapter describes the principal applications of conversational agents in the enterprise and the technical challenges posed by their design and large-scale deployments. These technical challenges fall into two categories:... Read more

In this paper, we propose a facial animation system for capturing both geometrical information and illumination changes of surface details, called expression details, from video clips simultaneously and the captured data can be widely applied to different 2D face images and 3D face models. While tracking the geometric data, we record the expression details by ratio images. For 2D facial animation synthesis, these ratio images are used to generate dynamic textures. Because a ratio image... Read more

We propose an answer to the “What is AI?” question, namely, that AI is really (or at least really ought in significant part to be) Psychometric AI (PAI). Along the way, we: set out and rebut five objections to PAI; describe PERI, a robot in our lab who exemplifies PAI; and briefly treat the future of Psychometric AI, first by pointing toward some promising AI-based applications, and then by raising some of the “big” philosophical... Read more

This paper reports the findings of a study conducted on the application of an on-line human-computer dialog system with natural language (chatbot) on the teaching of foreign languages. A keywords-based human-computer dialog system makes it possible that the user could chat with the computer using a natural language, i.e. in English or in German to some extent. So an experiment has been made using this system online to work as a chat partner with the... Read more