Papers

This paper is about the history, frustrations, considerations, and decisions that led to the creation of our award-winning ChatBot technology. We also look at issues involved in designing a ChatBot and how various programs have handled them. And we explore some uses for ChatBots. Read more

This paper describes the design, implementation, and use of an agent architecture that has been deployed in Alelo, Inc.’s language and culture training systems, which offer practical training for foreign language skills and intercultural competence. These agents support real-time conversation in the language of interest (Dari, Pashto, Arabic, French, and others), using automatic speech recognition and immersive simulation technologies. In earlier work, we developed a number of agent-based language and culture trainers, based on the... Read more

The aim of this study was to investigate if and how an artificially intelligent chat agent (chatbot) that answers questions about sex, drugs, and alcohol is used and evaluated by adolescents, especially in comparison with information lines and search engines. A sample of 929 adolescents (64% girls, mean age = 15), varying in urbanization level and educational level, participated in this study. Use of the chatbot was objectively tracked through server registrations (e.g., frequency and... Read more

This paper describes results from a large-scale survey to explore users’ comfort with different styles of avatars for workplace communication. Thirty-one avatars were evaluated based on users’ ratings along several dimensions and grouped into five different clusters. The highest rated cluster was the set of formal, realistic avatars that users did not feel were creepy. These avatars were ranked comparatively with webcam photos, and users felt that they would be appropriate for work. Our... Read more

Embodied conversational agents may take on a diversity of roles in learning and advisory scenarios including virtual teachers, advisors, learning companions, and autonomous actors in educational role play. They promote learner motivation, engagement, and self-confidence, and may help prevent and overcome negative affective states of learners, such as frustration and fear of failure. The chapter will provide guidelines and approved methods for the development of animated pedagogical agents including the extraction of multimodal tutorial... Read more

Electrocorticography (ECoG) has emerged as a new signal platform for brain–computer interface (BCI) systems. Classically, the cortical physiology that has been commonly investigated and utilized for device control in humans has been brain signals from the sensorimotor cortex. Hence, it was unknown whether other neurophysiological substrates, such as the speech network, could be used to further improve on or complement existing motor-based control paradigms. We demonstrate here for the first time that ECoG signals associated... Read more

Word sense disambiguation (WSD) and coreference resolution are two fundamental tasks for natural language processing. Unfortunately, they are seldom studied together. In this paper, we propose to incorporate the coreference resolution technique into a word sense disambiguation system for improving disambiguation precision. Our work is based on the existing instance knowledge network (IKN) based approach for WSD. With the help of coreference resolution, we are able to connect related candidate dependency graphs at the candidate... Read more

In this paper, a new high precision focused WSD approach is proposed, which not only attempts to identify the proper sense for a word but also provides the probabilistic evaluation for the identification confidence at the same time. A novel Instance Knowledge Network (IKN) is built to generate and maintain semantic knowledge at the word, type synonym set and instance levels. Related algorithms based on graph matching are developed to train IKN with probabilistic knowledge... Read more

Location-aware ambient environments are relevant in designing interactive virtual characters. However, they raise several questions about spatial behaviors to be displayed by virtual characters, and about the perception of virtual characters by users. We designed a location-aware virtual agent that adapts its spatial behavior to users' and objects' locations during a search task in a smart room. We conducted an experimental evaluation comparing this adaptive agent with an agent that does not perceive nor use... Read more

This paper seeks to investigate current development and applications of these systems worldwide, while focusing on their availability in Canadian libraries. It aims to argue that it is both timely and conceivable for Canadian libraries to consider adopting conversational agents to enhance – not replace – face-to-face human interaction. Potential users include library web site tour guides, automated virtual reference and readers' advisory librarians, and virtual story-tellers. To provide background and justification for this argument,... Read more