Technology assessment of advanced automation for space missions

Six general classes of technology requirements derived during the mission definition phase of the study were identified as having maximum importance and urgency, including autonomous world model based information systems, learning and hypothesis formation, natural language and other man-machine communication, space manufacturing, teleoperators and robot systems, and computer science and technology

On the simulation of interactive non-verbal behaviour in virtual humans

Development of virtual humans has focused mainly in two broad areas - conversational agents and computer game characters. Computer game characters have traditionally been action-oriented - focused on the game-play - and conversational agents have been focused on sensible/intelligent conversation. While virtual humans have incorporated some form of non-verbal behaviour, this has been quite limited and more importantly not connected or connected very loosely with the behaviour of a real human interacting with the virtual human - due to a lack of sensor data and no system to respond to that data. The interactional aspect of non-verbal behaviour is highly important in human-human interactions and previous research has demonstrated that people treat media (and therefore virtual humans) as real people, and so interactive non-verbal behaviour is also important in the development of virtual humans. This paper presents the challenges in creating virtual humans that are non-verbally interactive and drawing corollaries with the development history of control systems in robotics presents some approaches to solving these challenges - specifically using behaviour based systems - and shows how an order of magnitude increase in response time of virtual humans in conversation can be obtained and that the development of rapidly responding non-verbal behaviours can start with just a few behaviours with more behaviours added without difficulty later in development

Parsing of Spoken Language under Time Constraints

Spoken language applications in natural dialogue settings place serious requirements on the choice of processing architecture. Especially under adverse phonetic and acoustic conditions parsing procedures have to be developed which do not only analyse the incoming speech in a time-synchroneous and incremental manner, but which are able to schedule their resources according to the varying conditions of the recognition process. Depending on the actual degree of local ambiguity the parser has to select among the available constraints in order to narrow down the search space with as little effort as possible. A parsing approach based on constraint satisfaction techniques is discussed. It provides important characteristics of the desired real-time behaviour and attempts to mimic some of the attention focussing capabilities of the human speech comprehension mechanism.Comment: 19 pages, LaTe

Combining Expression and Content in Domains for Dialog Managers

We present work in progress on abstracting dialog managers from their domain in order to implement a dialog manager development tool which takes (among other data) a domain description as input and delivers a new dialog manager for the described domain as output. Thereby we will focus on two topics; firstly, the construction of domain descriptions with description logics and secondly, the interpretation of utterances in a given domain.Comment: 5 pages, uses conference.st

Spoken query processing for interactive information retrieval

It has long been recognised that interactivity improves the effectiveness of information retrieval systems. Speech is the most natural and interactive medium of communication and recent progress in speech recognition is making it possible to build systems that interact with the user via speech. However, given the typical length of queries submitted to information retrieval systems, it is easy to imagine that the effects of word recognition errors in spoken queries must be severely destructive on the system's effectiveness. The experimental work reported in this paper shows that the use of classical information retrieval techniques for spoken query processing is robust to considerably high levels of word recognition errors, in particular for long queries. Moreover, in the case of short queries, both standard relevance feedback and pseudo relevance feedback can be effectively employed to improve the effectiveness of spoken query processing

A Teacher in the Living Room? Educational Media for Babies, Toddlers, and Preschoolers

Examines available research, and arguments by proponents and critics, of electronic educational media use by young children. Examines educational claims in marketing and provides recommendations for developing research and product standards

A study of the very high order natural user language (with AI capabilities) for the NASA space station common module

The requirements are identified for a very high order natural language to be used by crew members on board the Space Station. The hardware facilities, databases, realtime processes, and software support are discussed. The operations and capabilities that will be required in both normal (routine) and abnormal (nonroutine) situations are evaluated. A structure and syntax for an interface (front-end) language to satisfy the above requirements are recommended

Do (and say) as I say: Linguistic adaptation in human-computer dialogs

© Theodora Koulouri, Stanislao Lauria, and Robert D. Macredie. This article has been made available through the Brunel Open Access Publishing Fund.There is strong research evidence showing that people naturally align to each other’s vocabulary, sentence structure, and acoustic features in dialog, yet little is known about how the alignment mechanism operates in the interaction between users and computer systems let alone how it may be exploited to improve the efficiency of the interaction. This article provides an account of lexical alignment in human–computer dialogs, based on empirical data collected in a simulated human–computer interaction scenario. The results indicate that alignment is present, resulting in the gradual reduction and stabilization of the vocabulary-in-use, and that it is also reciprocal. Further, the results suggest that when system and user errors occur, the development of alignment is temporarily disrupted and users tend to introduce novel words to the dialog. The results also indicate that alignment in human–computer interaction may have a strong strategic component and is used as a resource to compensate for less optimal (visually impoverished) interaction conditions. Moreover, lower alignment is associated with less successful interaction, as measured by user perceptions. The article distills the results of the study into design recommendations for human–computer dialog systems and uses them to outline a model of dialog management that supports and exploits alignment through mechanisms for in-use adaptation of the system’s grammar and lexicon