The role of intonation in processing left- and right- dislocations in French.

International audienceThis study attempts to determine the effects of intonation morphemes in French on the processing of simple reversible sentences containing a dislocated element. Synthetic speech stimuli were used. Subjects (80 children aged 5.0 and 6.0 and 48 adults, all monolingual, native French speakers) generally processed the sentences better when they retained the standard subject-verb-object order characteristic of most French utteranccs. When that ordcr was not maintained, appropriate intonation promoted the correct attribution of roles in sentences with 8 dislocated object. The on-line analysis of adult response timing suggested that intonation morphemes serve as processing instructions for these subjects, guiding them in deciding whether to express their answer immediately or to delay responding

Producing Acoustic-Prosodic Entrainment in a Robotic Learning Companion to Build Learner Rapport

abstract: With advances in automatic speech recognition, spoken dialogue systems are assuming increasingly social roles. There is a growing need for these systems to be socially responsive, capable of building rapport with users. In human-human interactions, rapport is critical to patient-doctor communication, conflict resolution, educational interactions, and social engagement. Rapport between people promotes successful collaboration, motivation, and task success. Dialogue systems which can build rapport with their user may produce similar effects, personalizing interactions to create better outcomes. This dissertation focuses on how dialogue systems can build rapport utilizing acoustic-prosodic entrainment. Acoustic-prosodic entrainment occurs when individuals adapt their acoustic-prosodic features of speech, such as tone of voice or loudness, to one another over the course of a conversation. Correlated with liking and task success, a dialogue system which entrains may enhance rapport. Entrainment, however, is very challenging to model. People entrain on different features in many ways and how to design entrainment to build rapport is unclear. The first goal of this dissertation is to explore how acoustic-prosodic entrainment can be modeled to build rapport. Towards this goal, this work presents a series of studies comparing, evaluating, and iterating on the design of entrainment, motivated and informed by human-human dialogue. These models of entrainment are implemented in the dialogue system of a robotic learning companion. Learning companions are educational agents that engage students socially to increase motivation and facilitate learning. As a learning companion’s ability to be socially responsive increases, so do vital learning outcomes. A second goal of this dissertation is to explore the effects of entrainment on concrete outcomes such as learning in interactions with robotic learning companions. This dissertation results in contributions both technical and theoretical. Technical contributions include a robust and modular dialogue system capable of producing prosodic entrainment and other socially-responsive behavior. One of the first systems of its kind, the results demonstrate that an entraining, social learning companion can positively build rapport and increase learning. This dissertation provides support for exploring phenomena like entrainment to enhance factors such as rapport and learning and provides a platform with which to explore these phenomena in future work.Dissertation/ThesisDoctoral Dissertation Computer Science 201

8th Annual Research in the Capitol [Program], March 26, 2013

Program of research presentations given at the Capitol by students from the University of Northern Iowa, Iowa State University, and the University of Iowa.https://scholarworks.uni.edu/programs_rcapitol/1009/thumbnail.jp

computational toy to enhance narrative perspective-talking

Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, School of Architecture and Planning, Program in Media Arts and Sciences, 2002.This electronic version was submitted by the student author. The certified thesis is available in the Institute Archives and Special Collections.Includes bibliographical references (leaves 88-95).School curricula are designed with the expectation that students achieve literacy. They usually support the acquisition of language by encouraging students to learn how to decode information within a sentence. In this thesis it is suggested that literacy skills in children five to seven years of age can be obtained with a broader understanding of language and its representation. Oral storytelling is presented as a way to develop metacognitive skills with a focus on character-based narrative where children must create the perspectives of the characters. The ability to tell stories is common to children from every community and can help them in school performance. Children should therefore be encouraged to express their understanding of character perspectives in oral storytelling. This thesis presents a tangible interface that allows children to practice pre-literacy skills using oral language. It introduces Dolltalk, a system that facilitates children's ability to take narrative perspectives through the mechanism of reporting speech. The toy presented works by asking children to tell stories and by playing back the stories to the child using narrative features. The ability to express the way the characters think and feel in a narrative and what motivates them to act has been shown to be predictive of academic competence among preschool children. A user study was conducted to understand the short-term effect of Dolltalk on children's elaboration of internal states of story characters. The results show that playing with Dolltalk encourages children to introduce their characters in the story and to express the internal states of their characters much more than with the use of a simple tape recorder. The results also show that playing with the current version of Dolltalk or with Dolltalk in tape-recorder mode encourages children to provide spatial and temporal information in their stories much more than they would without hearing any playback of their stories. This thesis presents significant results (p =.04) that indicate the current version of Dolltalk encourages children to express the internal states of their characters.by Catherine N. Vaucelle.S.M

Robot-Mediated Interviews: a Robotic Intermediary for Facilitating Communication with Children

Robots have been used in a variety of education, therapy or entertainment contexts. This thesis introduces the novel application of using humanoid robots for Robot-Mediated Interviews (RMIs). In the initial stages of this research it was necessary to first establish as a baseline if children would respond to a robot in an interview setting, therefore the first study compared how children responded to a robot and a human in an interview setting. Following this successful initial investigation, the second study expanded on this research by examining how children would respond to different types and difficulty of questions from a robot compared to a human interviewer. Building on these studies, the third study investigated how a RMI approach would work for children with special needs. Following the positive results from the three studies indicating that a RMI approach may have some potential, three separate user panel sessions were organised with user groups that have expertise in working with children and for whom the system would be potentially useful in their daily work. The panel sessions were designed to gather feedback on the previous studies and outline a set of requirements to make a RMI system feasible for real world users. The feedback and requirements from the user groups were considered and implemented in the system before conducting a final field trial of the system with a potential real world user. The results of the studies in this research reveal that the children generally interacted with KASPAR in a very similar to how they interacted with a human interviewer regardless of question type or difficulty. The feedback gathered from experts working with children suggested that the three most important and desirable features of a RMI system were: reliability, flexibility and ease of use. The feedback from the experts also indicated that a RMI system would most likely be used with children with special needs. The final field trial with 10 children and a potential real world user illustrated that a RMI system could potentially be used effectively outside of a research context, with all of the children in the trial responding to the robot. Feedback from the educational psychologist testing the system would suggest that a RMI approach could have real world implications if the system were developed further

Designing for Autonomy, Competence and Relatedness in Robot-Assisted Language Learning

The current number of immigrants has risen quickly in recent years due to globalization. People move to another country for economic, educational, emotional, and other reasons. As a result, immigrants need to learn the host language to integrate into their new living environment. However, the process of learning the host language for adult immigrants faces many challenges. Among those challenges, maintaining intrinsic motivation is critical for a long-term language study process and the well-being of adult immigrants. Self-Determination Theory (SDT) is a popular theoretical framework that explains human motivation, especially intrinsic motivation, through a psychological approach to understand its nature. According to SDT, humans are intrinsically motivated through the satisfaction of the three basic needs of Autonomy, Competence, and Relatedness. Many researchers have applied the theory to different topics and directions, including language learning. On the other hand, social robots have been used extensively in the language learning context due to their physical embodiments and the application of artificial intelligence in robotics. Furthermore, research has proven that social robots can create a relaxed and engaging learning environment, thus motivating language learners. The thesis designs and implements a RALL application called SAMQ using QTrobot, a humanoid social robot capable of producing body gestures, displaying different facial expressions, and multilingual communication. The study aims to investigate SAMQ’s ability to evoke intrinsic motivations of adult immigrants in learning the Finnish language. While previous research focuses on English as the second language (L2) and targets children, this thesis’s L2 is Finnish, and the learners are adult immigrants. The thesis conducts semi-structured interviews during the Pre-study phase (N=6) to gather real insights from adult immigrants living in Finland, to understand demotivating factors in their language learning experience and the unsatisfied aspects of the three basic needs. The qualitative findings from the Pre-study contribute to the design and implementation of two versions of SAMQ, aiming at evoking intrinsic motivations through satisfying unmet needs. The first version is a Quiz-only program that tests several assumptions regarding human-robot interaction (HRI). The final version of SAMQ is a more comprehensive language learning application that supports two modes of study: Learning and Quizzes. It consists of multiple modifications that address all adult immigrants’ basic needs while additionally promoting intrinsic motivation through media. The final Evaluation of SAMQ (N=6) includes a questionnaire and a semi-structured interview. The quantitative results of the questionnaire validated the ability of using social robots to evoke adult learners’ intrinsic motivation in the RALL context. The qualitative findings from the research high-light the importance of social robots’ physical embodiments in eliciting intrinsic motivation for adult learners through satisfying Relatedness. In addition, the use of voice modality creates a genuine HRI for adult learners, fulfilling both Autonomy and Competence, resulting in an engaging and smooth learning experience. Besides that, the use of adult learners’ L1 plays a crucial role in facilitating a relaxed and familiar learning environment, supplying both Competence and Relatedness. Moreover, multimedia learning materials make the learning experience more vivid and attractive. Ultimately, the result shows that accessibility and flexibility are essential attributes for adult learners to maintain their motivation for long-term language study through the satisfaction of Autonomy. Finally, the thesis proposes a design guideline for the RALL context. It consists of five design implications for evoking intrinsic motivation in adult learners through satisfying the three basic psychological needs of Autonomy, Competence, and Relatedness. The design guideline acts as a proposal for future design and implementation of RALL programs for adults and contributes to developing the human-robot interaction field

Expressive social exchange between humans and robots

Thesis (Sc.D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, 2000.Includes bibliographical references (p. 253-264).Sociable humanoid robots are natural and intuitive for people to communicate with and to teach. We present recent advances in building an autonomous humanoid robot, Kismet, that can engage humans in expressive social interaction. We outline a set of design issues and a framework that we have found to be of particular importance for sociable robots. Having a human-in-the-loop places significant social constraints on how the robot aesthetically appears, how its sensors are configured, its quality of movement, and its behavior. Inspired by infant social development, psychology, ethology, and evolutionary perspectives, this work integrates theories and concepts from these diverse viewpoints to enable Kismet to enter into natural and intuitive social interaction with a human caregiver, reminiscent of parent-infant exchanges. Kismet perceives a variety of natural social cues from visual and auditory channels, and delivers social signals to people through gaze direction, facial expression, body posture, and vocalizations. We present the implementation of Kismet's social competencies and evaluate each with respect to: 1) the ability of naive subjects to read and interpret the robot's social cues, 2) the robot's ability to perceive and appropriately respond to naturally offered social cues, 3) the robot's ability to elicit interaction scenarios that afford rich learning potential, and 4) how this produces a rich, flexible, dynamic interaction that is physical, affective, and social. Numerous studies with naive human subjects are described that provide the data upon which we base our evaluations.by Cynthia L. Breazeal.Sc.D

Affective Computing

This book provides an overview of state of the art research in Affective Computing. It presents new ideas, original results and practical experiences in this increasingly important research field. The book consists of 23 chapters categorized into four sections. Since one of the most important means of human communication is facial expression, the first section of this book (Chapters 1 to 7) presents a research on synthesis and recognition of facial expressions. Given that we not only use the face but also body movements to express ourselves, in the second section (Chapters 8 to 11) we present a research on perception and generation of emotional expressions by using full-body motions. The third section of the book (Chapters 12 to 16) presents computational models on emotion, as well as findings from neuroscience research. In the last section of the book (Chapters 17 to 22) we present applications related to affective computing

Advances in Human-Robot Interaction

Rapid advances in the field of robotics have made it possible to use robots not just in industrial automation but also in entertainment, rehabilitation, and home service. Since robots will likely affect many aspects of human existence, fundamental questions of human-robot interaction must be formulated and, if at all possible, resolved. Some of these questions are addressed in this collection of papers by leading HRI researchers