Designing Women: Essentializing Femininity in AI Linguistics

Since the eighties, feminists have considered technology a force capable of subverting sexism because of technology’s ability to produce unbiased logic. Most famously, Donna Haraway’s “A Cyborg Manifesto” posits that the cyborg has the inherent capability to transcend gender because of its removal from social construct and lack of loyalty to the natural world. But while humanoids and artificial intelligence have been imagined as inherently subversive to gender, current artificial intelligence perpetuates gender divides in labor and language as their programmers imbue them with traits considered “feminine.” A majority of 21st century AI and humanoids are programmed to fit female stereotypes as they fulfill emotional labor and perform pink-collar tasks, whether through roles as therapists, query-fillers, or companions. This paper examines four specific chat-based AI --ELIZA, XiaoIce, Sophia, and Erica-- and examines how their feminine linguistic patterns are used to maintain the illusion of emotional understanding in regards to the tasks that they perform. Overall, chat-based AI fails to subvert gender roles, as feminine AI are relegated to the realm of emotional intelligence and labor

Increase Apparent Public Speaking Fluency By Speech Augmentation

Fluent and confident speech is desirable to every speaker. But professional speech delivering requires a great deal of experience and practice. In this paper, we propose a speech stream manipulation system which can help non-professional speakers to produce fluent, professional-like speech content, in turn contributing towards better listener engagement and comprehension. We propose to achieve this task by manipulating the disfluencies in human speech, like the sounds 'uh' and 'um', the filler words and awkward long silences. Given any unrehearsed speech we segment and silence the filled pauses and doctor the duration of imposed silence as well as other long pauses ('disfluent') by a predictive model learned using professional speech dataset. Finally, we output a audio stream in which speaker sounds more fluent, confident and practiced compared to the original speech he/she recorded. According to our quantitative evaluation, we significantly increase the fluency of speech by reducing rate of pauses and fillers

THE EFFECT OF CHATBOTS RESPONSE LATENCY ON USERS’ TRUST

Chatbots are widely used as conversational agents and being designed using anthropomorphic design guidelines. However, response latency (response latency is the time it takes for a chatbot/person to provide a response immediately after receiving a message) as an anthropomorphic design cue in a conversational user interface has not been the subject of many studies. Even though the system's response latency has an undeniable effect on users' satisfaction and performance, the connection between users' trust and chatbots' response time is not addressed. A critical reason that executives are reluctant to implement chatbots for their businesses is the user adoption hesitancy. Customers and users are unwilling to engage with a chatbot because they do not trust chatbot. Therefore, this study used empirical data collected from chatbot users to investigate the effect of chatbots response latency on users’ trust – cognitive and affective trust. The results of this study suggest that dynamically delaying chatbot response increases users’ cognitive trust but has no significant impact on users’ affective trust. General sentiment analysis on chatbot users’ responses to an open-ended question that describes their experiences interacting with chatbots suggests that dynamically delaying chatbot response produces higher positive sentiment and trust sentiment than near-instant chatbot response. Other findings are discussed and some ideas for future research are also presented in this paper

Psychopathy, Agency, and Practical Reason

Philosophers have urged that considerations about the psychopath’s capacity for practical rationality can help to advance metaethical debates. These debates include the role of rational faculties in moral judgment and action, the relationship between moral judgment and moral motivation, and the capacities required for morally responsible agency. I discuss how the psychopath’s capacity for practical reason features in these debates, and I identify several takeaway lessons from the relevant literature. Specifically, I show how the insights contained therein can illuminate the complex structure of practical rationality, inform our standards for an adequate theory of practical reason, and frame our thinking about the significance of rational capacities in moral theory and social practice

STAY WITH ME - CONVERSATIONAL CHURN PREVENTION IN DIGITAL SUBSCRIPTION SERVICE

Lots of organizations use subscription business models. However, with increasing competition and technological progress switching costs for customers are decreasing. This development can translate to serious issues for subscription-based businesses, requiring action. Traditionally, businesses used mailings or calls, which are costly, time-consuming and often not effective. In this research-in-progress paper, we explore conversational churn prevention as a potential remedy. We present a conversational agent with persuasive design features (e.g., nudges) and first results from a pre-study. We conduct an in-between subject experiment and interviews for our mixed-methods evaluation of our pre-study. Our work contributes to theory, by presenting more insights into the interaction quality of conversational agents in the context of churn prevention of digital services and the role of persuasive design. We support practitioners, by guiding them towards more effective use of conversational agents to improve their services and to predict churn

Chatbots with Personality Using Deep Learning

Natural Language Processing (NLP) requires the computational modelling of the complex relationships of the syntax and semantics of a language. While traditional machine learning methods are used to solve NLP problems, they cannot imitate the human ability for language comprehension. With the growth in deep learning, these complexities within NLP are easier to model, and be used to build many computer applications. A particular example of this is a chatbot, where a human user has a conversation with a computer program, that generates responses based on the user’s input. In this project, we study the methods used in building chatbots, what they lack and what can be improved

The Effect of Story Narrative in Multimedia Learning

abstract: ELearning, distance learning, has been a fast-developing topic in educational area. In 1999, Mayer put forward “Cognitive Theory of Multimedia learning” (Moreno, & Mayer, 1999). The theory consisted of several principles. One of the principles, Modality Principle describes that when learners are presented with spoken words, their performance are better than that with on-screen texts (Mayer, R., Dow, & Mayer, S. 2003; Moreno, & Mayer, 1999).It gave an implication that learners performance can be affected by modality of learning materials. A very common tool in education in literature and language is narrative. This way of storytelling has received success in practical use. The advantages of using narrative includes (a) inherent format advantage such as simple structure and familiar language and ideas, (b) motivating learners, (c) facilitate listening, (d) oral ability and (e)provide schema for comparison in comprehension. Although this storytelling method has been widely used in literature, language and even moral education, few studies focused it on science and technology area. The study aims to test the effect of narrative effect in multimedia setting with science topic. A script-based story was applied. The multimedia settings include a virtual human with synthetic speech, and animation on a solar cell lesson. The experiment design is a randomized alternative- treatments design, in which participants are requested to watch a video with pedagogical agent in story format or not. Participants were collected from Amazon Mechanical Turk. Result of transfer score and retention score showed that no significant difference between narrative and non-narrative condition. Discussion was put forward for future study.Dissertation/ThesisMasters Thesis Engineering 201

Agents for educational games and simulations

This book consists mainly of revised papers that were presented at the Agents for Educational Games and Simulation (AEGS) workshop held on May 2, 2011, as part of the Autonomous Agents and MultiAgent Systems (AAMAS) conference in Taipei, Taiwan. The 12 full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from various submissions. The papers are organized topical sections on middleware applications, dialogues and learning, adaption and convergence, and agent applications