Continuous Interaction with a Virtual Human

Attentive Speaking and Active Listening require that a Virtual Human be capable of simultaneous perception/interpretation and production of communicative behavior. A Virtual Human should be able to signal its attitude and attention while it is listening to its interaction partner, and be able to attend to its interaction partner while it is speaking – and modify its communicative behavior on-the-fly based on what it perceives from its partner. This report presents the results of a four week summer project that was part of eNTERFACE’10. The project resulted in progress on several aspects of continuous interaction such as scheduling and interrupting multimodal behavior, automatic classification of listener responses, generation of response eliciting behavior, and models for appropriate reactions to listener responses. A pilot user study was conducted with ten participants. In addition, the project yielded a number of deliverables that are released for public access

Measuring Service Encounter Satisfaction with Customer Service Chatbots using Sentiment Analysis

Chatbots are software-based systems designed to interact with humans using text-based natural language and have attracted considerable interest in online service encounters. In this context, service providers face the challenge of measuring chatbot service encounter satisfaction (CSES), as most approaches are limited to post-interaction surveys that are rarely answered and often biased. Asa result, service providers cannot react quickly to service failures and dissatisfied customers. To address this challenge, we investigate the application of automated sentiment analysis methods as a proxy to measure CSES. Therefore, we first compare different sentiment analysis methods. Second, we investigate the relationship between objectively computed sentiment scores of dialogs and subjectively measured CSES values. Third, we evaluate whether this relationship also exists for utterance sequences throughout the dialog. The paper contributes by proposing and applying an automatic and objective approach to use sentiment scores as a proxy to measure CSES

Cooperation, collective action, and the archeology of large-scale societies

Archeologists investigating the emergence of large-scale societies in the past have renewed interest in examining the dynamics of cooperation as a means of understanding societal change and organizational variability within human groups over time. Unlike earlier approaches to these issues, which used models designated voluntaristic or managerial, contemporary research articulates more explicitly with frameworks for cooperation and collective action used in other fields, thereby facilitating empirical testing through better definition of the costs, benefits, and social mechanisms associated with success or failure in coordinated group action. Current scholarship is nevertheless bifurcated along lines of epistemology and scale, which is understandable but problematic for forging a broader, more transdisciplinary field of cooperation studies. Here, we point to some areas of potential overlap by reviewing archeological research that places the dynamics of social cooperation and competition in the foreground of the emergence of large-scale societies, which we define as those having larger populations, greater concentrations of political power, and higher degrees of social inequality. We focus on key issues involving the communal-resource management of subsistence and other economic goods, as well as the revenue flows that undergird political institutions. Drawing on archeological cases from across the globe, with greater detail from our area of expertise in Mesoamerica, we offer suggestions for strengthening analytical methods and generating more transdisciplinary research programs that address human societies across scalar and temporal spectra

Research Methods for Non-Representational Approaches of Organizational Complexity. The Dialogical and Mediated Inquiry

This paper explores the methodological implications of non-representational approaches of organizational complexity. Representational theories focus on the syntactic complexity of systems, whereas organizing processes are predominantly characterized by semantic and pragmatic forms of complexity. After underlining the contribution of non-representational approaches to the study of organizations, the paper warns against the risk of confining the critique of representational frameworks to paradoxical dichotomies like intuition versus reflexive thought or theorizing versus experimenting. To sort out this difficulty, it is suggested to use a triadic theory of interpretation, and more particularly the concepts of semiotic mediation, inquiry and dialogism. Semiotic mediation dynamically links situated experience and generic classes of meanings. Inquiry articulates logical thinking, narrative thinking and experimenting. Dialogism conceptualizes the production of meaning through the situated interactions of actors. A methodological approach based on those concepts, “the dialogical and mediated inquiry” (DMI), is proposed and experimented in a case study about work safety in the construction industry. This interpretive view requires complicating the inquiring process rather than the mirroring models of reality. In DMI, the inquiring process is complicated by establishing pluralist communities of inquiry in which different perspectives challenge each other. Finally the paper discusses the specific contribution of this approach compared with other qualitative methods and its present limits.Activity; Dialogism; Inquiry; Interpretation; Pragmatism; Research Methods; Semiotic Mediation; Work Safety