38,137 research outputs found
Smart Conversational Agents for Reminiscence
In this paper we describe the requirements and early system design for a
smart conversational agent that can assist older adults in the reminiscence
process. The practice of reminiscence has well documented benefits for the
mental, social and emotional well-being of older adults. However, the
technology support, valuable in many different ways, is still limited in terms
of need of co-located human presence, data collection capabilities, and ability
to support sustained engagement, thus missing key opportunities to improve care
practices, facilitate social interactions, and bring the reminiscence practice
closer to those with less opportunities to engage in co-located sessions with a
(trained) companion. We discuss conversational agents and cognitive services as
the platform for building the next generation of reminiscence applications, and
introduce the concept application of a smart reminiscence agent
Designing and Implementing Embodied Agents: Learning from Experience
In this paper, we provide an overview of part of our experience in designing and implementing some of the embodied agents and talking faces that we have used for our research into human computer interaction. We focus on the techniques that were used and evaluate this with respect to the purpose that the agents and faces were to serve and the costs involved in producing and maintaining the software. We discuss the function of this research and development in relation to the educational programme of our graduate students
Survey on Evaluation Methods for Dialogue Systems
In this paper we survey the methods and concepts developed for the evaluation
of dialogue systems. Evaluation is a crucial part during the development
process. Often, dialogue systems are evaluated by means of human evaluations
and questionnaires. However, this tends to be very cost and time intensive.
Thus, much work has been put into finding methods, which allow to reduce the
involvement of human labour. In this survey, we present the main concepts and
methods. For this, we differentiate between the various classes of dialogue
systems (task-oriented dialogue systems, conversational dialogue systems, and
question-answering dialogue systems). We cover each class by introducing the
main technologies developed for the dialogue systems and then by presenting the
evaluation methods regarding this class
Experimenting with the Gaze of a Conversational Agent
We have carried out a pilot experiment to investigate the effects of different eye gaze behaviors of a cartoon-like talking face on the quality of human-agent dialogues. We compared a version of the talking face that roughly implements some patterns of humanlike behavior with two other versions. We called this the optimal version. In one of the other versions the shifts in gaze were kept minimal and in the other version the shifts would occur randomly. The talking face has a number of restrictions. There is no speech recognition, so questions and replies have to\ud
be typed in by the users of the systems. Despite this restriction we found that participants that conversed with the optimal agent appreciated the agent more than participants that conversed with the other agents. Conversations with the optimal version proceeded more efficiently. Participants needed less time to complete their task
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