Feasibility report: Delivering case-study based learning using artificial intelligence and gaming technologies

This document describes an investigation into the technical feasibility of a game to support learning based on case studies. Information systems students using the game will conduct fact-finding interviews with virtual characters. We survey relevant technologies in computational linguistics and games. We assess the applicability of the various approaches and propose an architecture for the game based on existing techniques. We propose a phased development plan for the development of the game

Sharedness and privateness in human early social life

This research is concerned with the innate predispositions underlying human intentional communication. Human communication is currently defined as a circular and overt attempt to modify a partner's mental states. This requires each party involved to posse ss the ability to represent and understand the other's mental states, a capability which is commonly referred to as mindreading, or theory of mind (ToM). The relevant experimental literature agrees that no such capability is to be found in the human speci es at least during the first year of life, and possibly later. This paper aims at advancing a solution to this theoretical problem. We propose to consider sharedness as the basis for intentional communication in the infant and to view it as a primitive, i nnate component of her cognitive architecture. Communication can then build upon the mental grounds that the infant takes as shared with her caregivers. We view this capability as a theory of mind in a weak sense.

XL-NBT: A Cross-lingual Neural Belief Tracking Framework

Task-oriented dialog systems are becoming pervasive, and many companies heavily rely on them to complement human agents for customer service in call centers. With globalization, the need for providing cross-lingual customer support becomes more urgent than ever. However, cross-lingual support poses great challenges---it requires a large amount of additional annotated data from native speakers. In order to bypass the expensive human annotation and achieve the first step towards the ultimate goal of building a universal dialog system, we set out to build a cross-lingual state tracking framework. Specifically, we assume that there exists a source language with dialog belief tracking annotations while the target languages have no annotated dialog data of any form. Then, we pre-train a state tracker for the source language as a teacher, which is able to exploit easy-to-access parallel data. We then distill and transfer its own knowledge to the student state tracker in target languages. We specifically discuss two types of common parallel resources: bilingual corpus and bilingual dictionary, and design different transfer learning strategies accordingly. Experimentally, we successfully use English state tracker as the teacher to transfer its knowledge to both Italian and German trackers and achieve promising results.Comment: 13 pages, 5 figures, 3 tables, accepted to EMNLP 2018 conferenc

On the nature and role of intersubjectivity in communication

We outline a theory of human agency and communication and discuss the role that the capability to share (that is, intersubjectivity) plays in it. All the notions discussed are cast in a mentalistic and radically constructivist framework. We also introduce and discuss the relevant literature

Testimony and illusion

This paper considers a form of scepticism according to which sentences, along with other linguistic entities such as verbs and phonemes, etc., are never realized. If, whenever a conversational participant produces some noise or other, they and all other participants assume that a specific sentence has been realized (or, more colloquially, spoken), communication will be fluent whether or not the shared assumption is correct. That communication takes place is therefore, one might think, no ground for assuming that sentences are realized during a typical conversation. I reject both this 'folie-à-deux' view and the arguments for it due to Georges Rey. I do so by drawing on Gilbert Harman's no-false-lemmas principle. Since testimony is a form of knowledge and, according to the principle, knowledge cannot depend essentially on false assumptions, testimony is incompatible with the claim that sentence realization is but an illusion. Much of the paper is given over to defending this appeal to the no-false-lemmas principle. After all, a more attractive option might seem to be to infer instead that the principle is itself falsified by the folie-à-deux view

From Activity Recognition to Intention Recognition for Assisted Living Within Smart Homes

The file attached to this record is the author's final peer reviewed version. The Publisher's final version can be found by following the DOI link.The global population is aging; projections show that by 2050, more than 20% of the population will be aged over 64. This will lead to an increase in aging related illness, a decrease in informal support, and ultimately issues with providing care for these individuals. Assistive smart homes provide a promising solution to some of these issues. Nevertheless, they currently have issues hindering their adoption. To help address some of these issues, this study introduces a novel approach to implementing assistive smart homes. The devised approach is based upon an intention recognition mechanism incorporated into an intelligent agent architecture. This approach is detailed and evaluated. Evaluation was performed across three scenarios. Scenario 1 involved a web interface, focusing on testing the intention recognition mechanism. Scenarios 2 and 3 involved retrofitting a home with sensors and providing assistance with activities over a period of 3 months. The average accuracy for these three scenarios was 100%, 64.4%, and 83.3%, respectively. Future will extend and further evaluate this approach by implementing advanced sensor-filtering rules and evaluating more complex activities

Toward a social psychophysics of face communication

As a highly social species, humans are equipped with a powerful tool for social communication—the face, which can elicit multiple social perceptions in others due to the rich and complex variations of its movements, morphology, and complexion. Consequently, identifying precisely what face information elicits different social perceptions is a complex empirical challenge that has largely remained beyond the reach of traditional research methods. More recently, the emerging field of social psychophysics has developed new methods designed to address this challenge. Here, we introduce and review the foundational methodological developments of social psychophysics, present recent work that has advanced our understanding of the face as a tool for social communication, and discuss the main challenges that lie ahead