Conversational Assistants for Elderly Users – The Importance of Socially Cooperative Dialogue

Kopp S, Brandt M, Buschmeier H, et al. Conversational Assistants for Elderly Users – The Importance of Socially Cooperative Dialogue. In: André E, Bickmore T, Vrochidis S, Wanner L, eds. Proceedings of the AAMAS Workshop on Intelligent Conversation Agents in Home and Geriatric Care Applications co-located with the Federated AI Meeting. CEUR Workshop Proceedings. Vol 2338. Aachen: RWTH; 2018: 10–17.Conversational agents can provide valuable cognitive and/or emotional assistance to elderly users or people with cognitive impairments who often have difficulties in organizing and following a structured day schedule. Previous research showed that a virtual assistant that can interact in spoken language would be a desirable help for those users. However, these user groups pose specific requirements for spoken dialogue interaction that existing systems hardly meet. This paper presents work on a virtual conversational assistant that was designed for, and together with, elderly as well as cognitively handicapped users. It has been specifically developed to enable ‘socially cooperative dialogue’ – adaptive and aware conversational interaction in which mutual understanding is co-constructed and ensured collaboratively. The technical approach is described and results of evaluation studies are reported

A Review of Verbal and Non-Verbal Human-Robot Interactive Communication

In this paper, an overview of human-robot interactive communication is presented, covering verbal as well as non-verbal aspects of human-robot interaction. Following a historical introduction, and motivation towards fluid human-robot communication, ten desiderata are proposed, which provide an organizational axis both of recent as well as of future research on human-robot communication. Then, the ten desiderata are examined in detail, culminating to a unifying discussion, and a forward-looking conclusion

Crowdsourcing for Reminiscence Chatbot Design

In this work-in-progress paper we discuss the challenges in identifying effective and scalable crowd-based strategies for designing content, conversation logic, and meaningful metrics for a reminiscence chatbot targeted at older adults. We formalize the problem and outline the main research questions that drive the research agenda in chatbot design for reminiscence and for relational agents for older adults in general

flexdiam – flexible dialogue management for problem-aware, incremental spoken interaction for all user groups (demo paper)

Yaghoubzadeh R, Kopp S. flexdiam – flexible dialogue management for problem-aware, incremental spoken interaction for all user groups (demo paper). In: Proceedings of the 7th Workshop on Speech and Language Processing for Assistive Technologies (SLPAT 2016). 2016: 87-90

Socially cooperative behavior for artificial companions for elderly and cognitively impaired people

Yaghoubzadeh R, Buschmeier H, Kopp S. Socially cooperative behavior for artificial companions for elderly and cognitively impaired people. In: Proceedings of the 1st International Symposium on Companion-Technology. Ulm, Germany; 2015: 15-19

flexdiam – flexible dialogue management for incremental interaction with virtual agents (demo paper)

Yaghoubzadeh R, Kopp S. flexdiam – flexible dialogue management for incremental interaction with virtual agents (demo paper). In: Traum D, Swartout W, Khooshabeh P, Kopp S, Scherer S, Leuski A, eds. Proceedings of the 16th International Conference on Intelligent Virtual Agents (IVA 2016). LNCS (LNAI). Vol 10011. Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer; 2016: 476-479

Enabling robust and fluid spoken dialogue with cognitively impaired users

Yaghoubzadeh R, Kopp S. Enabling robust and fluid spoken dialogue with cognitively impaired users. In: Proceedings of the 18th Annual SIGdial Meeting on Discourse and Dialogue. Saarbrücken, Germany: Association for Computational Linguistics; 2017: 273--283.We present the flexdiam dialogue management architecture, which was developed in a series of projects dedicated to tailoring spoken interaction to the needs of users with cognitive impairments in an everyday assistive domain, using a multimodal front-end. This hybrid DM architecture affords incremental processing of uncertain input, a flexible, mixed-initiative information grounding process that can be adapted to users' cognitive capacities and interactive idiosyncrasies, and generic mechanisms that foster transitions in the joint discourse state that are understandable and controllable by those users, in order to effect a robust interaction for users with varying capacities. [Link to poster and supplemental materials](https://purl.org/net/ramin/sigdial2017