Scenarios in virtual learning environments for one-to-one communication skills training

A scenario is a description of a series of interactions between a player and a virtual character for one-to-one communication skills training, where at each step the player is faced with a choice between statements. In this paper, we analyse the characteristics of scenarios and provide a classification to represent such scenarios. The analysis is performed through a literature review and by comparing virtual learning environments for scenario based training. Using this analysis we specify requirements for describing communication scenarios related to their: structure (linear, branching, interleaving), properties (static information stored per scenario like situation, background, which virtual character to show), and parameters (characteristics of a scenario that can be modified per statement like a score on a learning goal and an emotional effect in a virtual character). We define a schema for representing such communication scenarios and present an authoring tool to create a scenario.This study is part of the RAGE project. The RAGE project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 644187. This publication reflects only the author's view. The European Commission is not responsible for any use that may be made of the information it contains

Using Computational Agents to Design Participatory Social Simulations

In social science, the role of stakeholders is increasing in the development and use of simulation models. Their participation in the design of agent-based models (ABMs) has widely been considered as an efficient solution to the validation of this particular type of model. Traditionally, "agents" (as basic model elements) have not been concerned with stakeholders directly but via designers or role-playing games (RPGs). In this paper, we intend to bridge this gap by introducing computational or software agents, implemented from an initial ABM, into a new kind of RPG, mediated by computers, so that these agents can interact with stakeholders. This interaction can help not only to elicit stakeholders' informal knowledge or unpredicted behaviours, but also to control stakeholders' focus during the games. We therefore formalize a general participatory design method using software agents, and illustrate it by describing our experience in a project aimed at developing agent-based social simulations in the field of air traffic management.Participatory Social Simulations, Agent-Based Social Simulations, Computational Agents, Role-Playing Games, Artificial Maieutics, User-Centered Design

Towards the Use of Dialog Systems to Facilitate Inclusive Education

Continuous advances in the development of information technologies have currently led to the possibility of accessing learning contents from anywhere, at anytime, and almost instantaneously. However, accessibility is not always the main objective in the design of educative applications, specifically to facilitate their adoption by disabled people. Different technologies have recently emerged to foster the accessibility of computers and new mobile devices, favoring a more natural communication between the student and the developed educative systems. This chapter describes innovative uses of multimodal dialog systems in education, with special emphasis in the advantages that they provide for creating inclusive applications and learning activities

User Interface Abstraction for enabling TV set based Inclusive Access to the Information Society

199 p.The television (TV) set is present in most homes worldwide, and is the most used Information and Communication Technology (ICT). Despite its large implantation in the market, the interactive services consumption on TV set is limited. This thesis focuses on overcoming the following limiting factors: (i) limited Human Computer Interaction and (ii) lack of considering user’s real life context in the digital television (dTV) service integration strategy. Making interactive services accessible to TV set’s large user base, and especially to the most vulnerable ones, is understood as the path to integrate the mankind with the information society. This thesis explores the use of user interface abstraction technologies to reach the introduced goals. The main contributions of this thesis are: (i) an approach to enable the universally accessible remote control of the TV set, (ii) an approach for the provision of universally accessible interactive services through TV sets, and (iii) an approach for the provision of universally accessible services in the TV user’s real life context. We have implemented the contributing approaches for different use cases, and we have evaluated them with real users, achieving good results

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

Workflow-Guided Response Generation for Task-Oriented Dialogue

Task-oriented dialogue (TOD) systems aim to achieve specific goals through interactive dialogue. Such tasks usually involve following specific workflows, i.e. executing a sequence of actions in a particular order. While prior work has focused on supervised learning methods to condition on past actions, they do not explicitly optimize for compliance to a desired workflow. In this paper, we propose a novel framework based on reinforcement learning (RL) to generate dialogue responses that are aligned with a given workflow. Our framework consists of ComplianceScorer, a metric designed to evaluate how well a generated response executes the specified action, combined with an RL opimization process that utilizes an interactive sampling technique. We evaluate our approach on two TOD datasets, Action-Based Conversations Dataset (ABCD) (Chen et al., 2021a) and MultiWOZ 2.2 (Zang et al., 2020) on a range of automated and human evaluation metrics. Our findings indicate that our RL-based framework outperforms baselines and is effective at enerating responses that both comply with the intended workflows while being expressed in a natural and fluent manner