1,074 research outputs found
Interactive narration with a child: impact of prosody and facial expressions
International audienceIntelligent Virtual Agents are suitable means for interactive sto-rytelling for children. The engagement level of child interaction with virtual agents is a challenging issue in this area. However, the characteristics of child-agent interaction received moderate to little attention in scientific studies whereas such knowledge may be crucial to design specific applications. This article proposes a Wizard of Oz platform for interactive narration. An experimental study in the context of interactive story-telling exploiting this platform is presented to evaluate the impact of agent prosody and facial expressions on child participation during storytelling. The results show that the use of the virtual agent with prosody and facial expression modalities improves the engagement of children in interaction during the narrative sessions
A Virtual Conversational Agent for Teens with Autism: Experimental Results and Design Lessons
We present the design of an online social skills development interface for
teenagers with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). The interface is intended to
enable private conversation practice anywhere, anytime using a web-browser.
Users converse informally with a virtual agent, receiving feedback on nonverbal
cues in real-time, and summary feedback. The prototype was developed in
consultation with an expert UX designer, two psychologists, and a pediatrician.
Using the data from 47 individuals, feedback and dialogue generation were
automated using a hidden Markov model and a schema-driven dialogue manager
capable of handling multi-topic conversations. We conducted a study with nine
high-functioning ASD teenagers. Through a thematic analysis of post-experiment
interviews, identified several key design considerations, notably: 1) Users
should be fully briefed at the outset about the purpose and limitations of the
system, to avoid unrealistic expectations. 2) An interface should incorporate
positive acknowledgment of behavior change. 3) Realistic appearance of a
virtual agent and responsiveness are important in engaging users. 4)
Conversation personalization, for instance in prompting laconic users for more
input and reciprocal questions, would help the teenagers engage for longer
terms and increase the system's utility
Generating socially appropriate tutorial dialog
Analysis of student-tutor coaching dialogs suggest that good human tutors attend to and attempt to influence the motivational state of learners. Moreover, they are sensitive to the social face of the learner, and seek to mitigate the potential face threat of their comments. This paper describes a dialog generator for pedagogical agents that takes motivation and face threat factors into account. This enables the agent to interact with learners in a socially appropriate fashion, and foster intrinsic motivation on the part of the learner, which in turn may lead to more positive learner affective states
Collaborative learning with affective artificial study companions in a virtual learning environment
This research has been carried out in conjunction with Chapeltown and Harehills
Assisted Learning Computer School (CHALCS) and local schools. CHALCS is an 'out-of-hours' school in a deprived inner-city community where unemployment is high and many children are failing to meet their educational potential. As the name implies CHALCS provides students with access to computers to support their learning. CHALCS relies on many volunteer tutors and specialist tutors are in short supply. This is especially true for subjects such as Advanced Level Physics with low numbers of students. This research aimed to investigate the feasibility of providing online study skills support to pupils at CHALCS and a local school. Research suggests that collaborative learning that prompts students to explain and justify their understanding can encourage deeper learning. As a potentially effective way of motivating deeper learning from hypertext course notes in a Virtual Learning Environment (VLE), this research investigates the feasibility of designing an artificial Agent capable of collaborating with the learner to jointly construct summary notes. Hypertext course notes covering a portion of the Advanced Level Physics curriculum were designed and uploaded into a WebCT based VLE. A specialist tutor validated the content of the course notes before the ease of use of the VLE was tested with target students. A study was then conducted to develop a model of the kinds of help students required in writing summary notes from the course-notes. Based on the derived process model of summarisation and an analysis of the content structure of the course notes, strategies for summarising the text were devised. An Animated Pedagogical Agent was designed incorporating these strategies. Two versions of the agent with opposing 'Affectations' (giving the appearance of different characters) were evaluated with users. It was therefore possible to test which artificial 'character' students preferred. From the evaluation study some conclusions are made concerning the effect of the two opposite characterisations on student perceptions of the agent and the degree to which it was helpful as a learning companion. Some recommendations for future work are then made
CRWIZ: A Framework for Crowdsourcing Real-Time Wizard-of-Oz Dialogues
Large corpora of task-based and open-domain conversational dialogues are
hugely valuable in the field of data-driven dialogue systems. Crowdsourcing
platforms, such as Amazon Mechanical Turk, have been an effective method for
collecting such large amounts of data. However, difficulties arise when
task-based dialogues require expert domain knowledge or rapid access to
domain-relevant information, such as databases for tourism. This will become
even more prevalent as dialogue systems become increasingly ambitious,
expanding into tasks with high levels of complexity that require collaboration
and forward planning, such as in our domain of emergency response. In this
paper, we propose CRWIZ: a framework for collecting real-time Wizard of Oz
dialogues through crowdsourcing for collaborative, complex tasks. This
framework uses semi-guided dialogue to avoid interactions that breach
procedures and processes only known to experts, while enabling the capture of a
wide variety of interactions. The framework is available at
https://github.com/JChiyah/crwizComment: 10 pages, 5 figures. To Appear in LREC 202
"Hey Model!" -- Natural User Interactions and Agency in Accessible Interactive 3D Models
While developments in 3D printing have opened up opportunities for improved
access to graphical information for people who are blind or have low vision
(BLV), they can provide only limited detailed and contextual information.
Interactive 3D printed models (I3Ms) that provide audio labels and/or a
conversational agent interface potentially overcome this limitation. We
conducted a Wizard-of-Oz exploratory study to uncover the multi-modal
interaction techniques that BLV people would like to use when exploring I3Ms,
and investigated their attitudes towards different levels of model agency.
These findings informed the creation of an I3M prototype of the solar system. A
second user study with this model revealed a hierarchy of interaction, with BLV
users preferring tactile exploration, followed by touch gestures to trigger
audio labels, and then natural language to fill in knowledge gaps and confirm
understanding.Comment: Paper presented at ACM CHI 2020: Proceedings of the 2020 CHI
Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, ACM, New York, April 2020;
Replacement: typos correcte
Dialogue based interfaces for universal access.
Conversation provides an excellent means of communication for almost all people. Consequently, a conversational interface is an excellent mechanism for allowing people to interact with systems. Conversational systems are an active research area, but a wide range of systems can be developed with current technology. More sophisticated interfaces can take considerable effort, but simple interfaces can be developed quite rapidly. This paper gives an introduction to the current state of the art of conversational systems and interfaces. It describes a methodology for developing conversational interfaces and gives an example of an interface for a state benefits web site. The paper discusses how this interface could improve access for a wide range of people, and how further development of this interface would allow a larger range of people to use the system and give them more functionality
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