Papers

We propose a conversational agent that can act as a virtual representative of a web site interacting with visitors using natural languages. The agent consists of three main components: dialogue act categorization, structured pattern matching, and knowledge construction and representation. Dialogue acts are identified by automata which accept sequences of keywords defined for each of the dialogue acts. We use these DAs to identify the user’s intention. To make the DA analysis process more effective,... Read more

We report on recent work on human-robot spoken dialogue interaction in the context of Hygeiorobot, a project that aims to build a mobile robotic assistant for hospitals. Spoken dialogue systems are particularly suitable to this context, as the robot does not carry a keyboard or other common interaction devices, and is intended to be used by people with little or no computing experience. In this paper, we concentrate on dialogue management issues. After providing a brief survey of dialogue management... Read more

Synthesis of lifelike gesture is finding growing attention in human-computer interaction. In particular, synchronization of synthetic gestures with speech output is one of the goals for embodied conversational agents which have become a new paradigm for the study of gesture and for human-computer interface. In this context, this contribution presents an operational model that enables lifelike gesture animations of an articulated figure to be rendered in real time from representations of spatiotemporal gesture knowledge. Based... Read more

We present a deployed, conversational dialog system that assists users in finding computers based on their usage patterns and constraints on specifications. We discuss findings from a market survey and two user studies. We compared our system to a directed dialog system and a menu driven navigation system. We found that the conversational interface reduced the average number of clicks by 63% and the average interaction time by 33% over a menu driven search system.... Read more

Language delay is a term used to describe a problem in acquiring a first language in childhood on a normal schedule. The paper describes milestones of child language development - the onset of babbling, first words, first sentences - which are variable across individuals in a culture, despite the universal similarity in the general ages of their development. The paper contains an explanation of a linguistic disorder called "chatterbox syndrome", characterized by severe mental retardation but... Read more

This article describes Artificial Life, Inc.’s WebGuide, an intelligent software bot that helps users navigate a Web site using natural language. The article describes the technology behind ALife-WebGuide, discusses some of the issues involved in commercialization of this type of user interface, and summarizes possible enhancements for future versions of this product. Read more

Information dissemination is slowly moving from printed media to electronic media. However this step cannot be completed if the electronic commercialization of information does not provide the same guarantees against copyright infringement as the printed media. In this paper we present the major requirement for the commercialization of electronic information and describe Hypermedia Electronic Publishing (HEP), an agent-based framework we developed for the commercialization of arbitrary electronic documents. Read more

Project COGITO aims at an agent-based interface for B-to-C applications that is not merely re-active to some user request, but pro-active and capable of engaging in a goal-directed conversation with the user, e.g., by taking the initiative to recommend new products. The approach combines content-based filtering, where user profiles are generated based on content features extracted from documents that users find relevant, with collaborative filtering which clusters users according to their... Read more

This paper discusses pedagogical issues for intelligent agents to successfully serve as mentors for educational purposes. Broader issues about the nature or persona necessary for an intelligent agent as mentor are discussed, incorporating usability and human-computer interaction issues such as the anthropomorphic qualities of the agent and the social relationship between learner and agent. Overall, to be effective for learning, it is argued that there are three main requirements for agents as mentors: 1) regulated... Read more

Social dialogue can be used by an embodied interface agent both to satisfy "interpersonal" goals, such as building rapport with the user and demonstrating the expertise of the agent, and to directly or indirectly satisfy task goals, such as acquiring background information about the user. We describe the ongoing development of an embodied conversational agent that is capable of multimodal input understanding and output generation and operates in a limited application domain in which both... Read more