4,657 research outputs found
Who am I talking with? A face memory for social robots
In order to provide personalized services and to
develop human-like interaction capabilities robots need to rec-
ognize their human partner. Face recognition has been studied
in the past decade exhaustively in the context of security systems
and with significant progress on huge datasets. However, these
capabilities are not in focus when it comes to social interaction
situations. Humans are able to remember people seen for a
short moment in time and apply this knowledge directly in
their engagement in conversation. In order to equip a robot with
capabilities to recall human interlocutors and to provide user-
aware services, we adopt human-human interaction schemes to
propose a face memory on the basis of active appearance models
integrated with the active memory architecture. This paper
presents the concept of the interactive face memory, the applied
recognition algorithms, and their embedding into the robot’s
system architecture. Performance measures are discussed for
general face databases as well as scenario-specific datasets
Listening between the Lines: Learning Personal Attributes from Conversations
Open-domain dialogue agents must be able to converse about many topics while
incorporating knowledge about the user into the conversation. In this work we
address the acquisition of such knowledge, for personalization in downstream
Web applications, by extracting personal attributes from conversations. This
problem is more challenging than the established task of information extraction
from scientific publications or Wikipedia articles, because dialogues often
give merely implicit cues about the speaker. We propose methods for inferring
personal attributes, such as profession, age or family status, from
conversations using deep learning. Specifically, we propose several Hidden
Attribute Models, which are neural networks leveraging attention mechanisms and
embeddings. Our methods are trained on a per-predicate basis to output rankings
of object values for a given subject-predicate combination (e.g., ranking the
doctor and nurse professions high when speakers talk about patients, emergency
rooms, etc). Experiments with various conversational texts including Reddit
discussions, movie scripts and a collection of crowdsourced personal dialogues
demonstrate the viability of our methods and their superior performance
compared to state-of-the-art baselines.Comment: published in WWW'1
Towards Question-based Recommender Systems
Conversational and question-based recommender systems have gained increasing
attention in recent years, with users enabled to converse with the system and
better control recommendations. Nevertheless, research in the field is still
limited, compared to traditional recommender systems. In this work, we propose
a novel Question-based recommendation method, Qrec, to assist users to find
items interactively, by answering automatically constructed and algorithmically
chosen questions. Previous conversational recommender systems ask users to
express their preferences over items or item facets. Our model, instead, asks
users to express their preferences over descriptive item features. The model is
first trained offline by a novel matrix factorization algorithm, and then
iteratively updates the user and item latent factors online by a closed-form
solution based on the user answers. Meanwhile, our model infers the underlying
user belief and preferences over items to learn an optimal question-asking
strategy by using Generalized Binary Search, so as to ask a sequence of
questions to the user. Our experimental results demonstrate that our proposed
matrix factorization model outperforms the traditional Probabilistic Matrix
Factorization model. Further, our proposed Qrec model can greatly improve the
performance of state-of-the-art baselines, and it is also effective in the case
of cold-start user and item recommendations.Comment: accepted by SIGIR 202
Theoretical and Factual Meaning in Assisted Instruction
Technology determines new borders for knowledge domain while education reflects more complex activities. A solution in this context is to integrate technology in the educational system, extending it as e-Education.E-Education is a dynamic system and a conceptdeveloped on three kinds of infrastructure which are likely to emerge: technological infrastructure, conceptual infrastructure of the type ofthe study programmes, and cognitive infrastructure of all participants involved in the teaching-learning activities. The purpose of this paper is to provide a meaningful framework for contextual learning, developed on the idea that a personal computer can deliver many skills to a student, but only academic environment can connect those skills to a modern community where they belong. This approach is developed on the much known principle which sustain that the educational system becomes the engine of the learning society.Scientific Research in E-Education, Assisted Instruction, E-Classroom, Didactic Knowledge, Concepts Map Approach
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
Reinforcement learning for personalized dialogue management
Language systems have been of great interest to the research community and
have recently reached the mass market through various assistant platforms on
the web. Reinforcement Learning methods that optimize dialogue policies have
seen successes in past years and have recently been extended into methods that
personalize the dialogue, e.g. take the personal context of users into account.
These works, however, are limited to personalization to a single user with whom
they require multiple interactions and do not generalize the usage of context
across users. This work introduces a problem where a generalized usage of
context is relevant and proposes two Reinforcement Learning (RL)-based
approaches to this problem. The first approach uses a single learner and
extends the traditional POMDP formulation of dialogue state with features that
describe the user context. The second approach segments users by context and
then employs a learner per context. We compare these approaches in a benchmark
of existing non-RL and RL-based methods in three established and one novel
application domain of financial product recommendation. We compare the
influence of context and training experiences on performance and find that
learning approaches generally outperform a handcrafted gold standard
Emotion and memory model for social robots: a reinforcement learning based behaviour selection
In this paper, we propose a reinforcement learning (RL) mechanism for social robots to select an action based on users’ learning performance and social engagement. We applied this behavior selection mechanism to extend the emotion and memory model, which allows a robot to create a memory account of the user’s emotional events and adapt its behavior based on the developed memory. We evaluated the model in a vocabulary-learning task at a school during a children’s game involving robot interaction to see if the model results in maintaining engagement and improving vocabulary learning across the four different interaction sessions. Generally, we observed positive findings based on child vocabulary learning and sustaining social engagement during all sessions. Compared to the trends of a previous study, we observed a higher level of social engagement across sessions in terms of the duration of the user gaze toward the robot. For vocabulary retention, we saw similar trends in general but also showing high vocabulary retention across some sessions. The findings indicate the benefits of applying RL techniques that have a reward system based on multi-modal user signals or cues
Adaptive and Reactive Rich Internet Applications
In this thesis we present the client-side approach of Adaptive and Reactive Rich Internet Applications as the main result of our research into how to bring in time adaptivity to Rich Internet Applications. Our approach leverages previous work on adaptive hypermedia, event processing and other research disciplines. We present a holistic framework covering the design-time as well as the runtime aspects of Adaptive and Reactive Rich Internet Applications focusing especially on the run-time aspects
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