Research News & Events

Cassandra is our “Figure of Speech”, a title that nicely represents who and what she is.  ejTalk’s mission from the very beginning has been to focus on the basic elements of conversation instead of developing products to accomplish a singular task.  Most conversational agents today serve a particular purpose.  They talk about specific topics but do not communicate in very conversational ways.

ejTalk takes the opposite approach with Cassandra by laying a foundation for the basic principles of day-to-day speech that will one day allow her to talk about anything.  Take the example of a greeting: There are many ways to introduce oneself to another person.  We may say “hello” to a person we have just met, but to a friend we will say “hey” or “hi.”  It may seem like a trivial distinction, but to the human ear, the effect is highly noticeable.

Cassandra’s entry in the SpeechTEK Europe Avatar Challenge.

After almost seven months of hard work, we are proud to present version 2.6 of Chatbots.org. This version features multiple forums, a sophisticated account mechanism, and a sleek design of sub navigation, body, and footer.

This paper is about conversation, or how people talk, and the unit of analysis used to understand the organization of conversation, the turn. It is a product of empirical research and identifies the basic unit of analysis for analyzing and generating natural conversational interaction. It represents a new paradigm, an entirely new way to measure and quantify conversational patterns that are culture, language and gender independent.

It is one of a series of papers that will be published. It is the first paper leading up to the development of Natural Conversational Technology. A long list of potential applications will also be published, such as. how to teach intelligent devices to engage in conversational interaction as a human being or how to do opinion mining from dynamic text.

Download the first paper ‘The Organization of Conversation’