Papers about Knowledge

Chatterbots are computer programs that simulate intelligent conversation. They are situated between games and toys, as their aim is mostly to be entertaining, but the user doesn't have to follow precise rules when playing with the program. Currently business and educational applications have started to emerge as a further development of the idea of intelligent dialog. For the game industry, they come close to the concept of NPC, or Non-Player Character, and they may become... Read more

How does one go about designing a human? With the rise in recent years of virtual humans this is no longer purely a philosophical question. Virtual humans are intelligent agents with a body, often a human-like graphical body, that interact verbally and non-verbally with human users on a variety of tasks and applications. At a recent meeting on this subject, the above authors participated in a several day discussion on the question of virtual human... 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

Imagine a future world where humans and machines will be involved in joint activities requiring social skills. This paper presents an overview of the dawnings of this world, concentrating on chatterbots – computer programs which engage the user in written conversation – and their users. Driving upon Clark’s theory of Language and the psychological theory of self-categorisation by Turner, it presents an analysis of social reactions to chatterbots and a taxonomy of the technology. The... 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

AIML - A recently developed standard for describing knowledge for Robots using XML data structures is introduced. A very large English-based robot knowledge base developed using the standard is described. Many other knowledge-based projects based on other international languages are described. The English-based knowledge base is currently interacting with people at a rate of 100,000 inquiries per day. A unique web-based computer architecture (http://www.pandorabots.com) supporting the on-going development of the knowledge base is described. The... Read more

The notion of trust has been virtually absent from most work on how people assess and choose their information sources. Based on two empirical cases this study shows that software engineers and users of e-commerce websites devote a lot of attention to considerations about the trustworthiness of their sources, which include people, documents, and virtual agents. In the project-based software engineering environment trust tends to be a collaborative issue and the studied software engineers normally... Read more

The notion of trust has been virtually absent from most work on how people assess and choose their information sources. Based on two empirical cases this study shows that software engineers and users of e-commerce websites devote a lot of attention to considerations about the trustworthiness of their sources, which include people, documents, and virtual agents. In the project-based software engineering environment trust tends to be a collaborative issue and the studied software engineers normally... Read more

Reearch into virtual environments on the one hand and artificial intelligence and artificial life on the other has largely been carried out by two different groups of people with different preoccupations and interests, but some convergence is now apparent between the two fields. Applications in which activity independent of the user takes place — involving crowds or other agents — are beginning to be tackled, while synthetic agents, virtual humans and computer pets are all areas... Read more