Debbie, the Debate Bot of the Future

Chatbots are a rapidly expanding application of dialogue systems with companies switching to bot services for customer support, and new applications for users interested in casual conversation. One style of casual conversation is argument, many people love nothing more than a good argument. Moreover, there are a number of existing corpora of argumentative dialogues, annotated for agreement and disagreement, stance, sarcasm and argument quality. This paper introduces Debbie, a novel arguing bot, that selects arguments from conversational corpora, and aims to use them appropriately in context. We present an initial working prototype of Debbie, with some preliminary evaluation and describe future work.Comment: IWSDS 201

New communication practices on the radio and in the audiosphere

For the past decade or so, internet radio, podcasts, mobile sound apps, and digital libraries of audio content have enjoyed increasing popularity among researchers and receivers of culture. Radio, similarly to other traditional media, often experiments with the opportunities offered by the new media technologies enabling the emergence of new communicational practices. As a starting point, I consider the contemporary audiosphere, which constitutes the auditory part of the audio-visual culture, and the influence of technological changes on radio communications, artists, and receivers. I attempt to answer the question, what happens at genre fringes? What are the characteristic features of the emerging forms? How, when one is faced with new technology, the multimedia world, and virtual reality, can one reach a reflection on the fiction and non-fiction genres on the radio? The expansive character of new technologies is often the source of inspiration for that which is traditional, thus renewing the object of its study. The inclusion of new phenomena within the widely understood auditoriness has a rescuing nature for traditional forms, and, at the same time, offers new opportunities for creators, and thus an area of research for literary scientists, media scientists and literary critics

Unity In Diversity: Moving Indonesian Theater, Film, and Television Forward

AbstractThe purpose of this article is to show how Indonesia has experienced a tremendous change in its approach to acting in the last 20 years, but it has not been for the better. The modern era of film and television has led to a misleading perception among the Indonesian people regarding the art of “acting,” thereby resulting in an unfavorable attitude toward the craft. This misleading perception stems from the effect of traditional Indonesian theater to its modern counterpart without any adjustments to cater to the millennial generation of Indonesians. The paper explores the roots of this misleading perception. It starts with the problem of applying Indonesian cultural policy, catering to such diverse artistic expressions in Indonesia, educating the artists, all the way to providing the specific educational infrastructure for the arts. The article provides examples of past theater and film productions to point out the problems of modern versus traditional acting styles, the challenges of translations of classic and contemporary western plays into the Indonesian language, the difficulties to apply such rigid interpretations by prominent Indonesian writer to contemporary Indonesian acting styles. The article shows that only by improving and implementing sound Indonesian cultural policy, developing and managing specific educational infrastructure for the arts, and creating a new acting method or re-considering the pre-existing ones, the Indonesian theatre, film, and television will be able to move forward

Gameplay, Interactive Drama, and Training: Authoring Edutainment Stories for Online Players (AESOP)

This paper describes initial efforts at providing some of the technological advances of the videogame genres in a coherent, accessible format to teams of educators. By providing these capabilities inside an interactive drama generator, we believe that the full potential of educational games may eventually be realized. Sections 1 and 2 postulate three goals for reaching that objective: a toolset for interactive drama authoring, ways to insulate authors from game engines, and reusable digital casts to facilitate composability. Sections 3 and 4 present progress on those tools and an in-depth case study that made use of the resulting toolset to create a large interactive drama. We close with lessons learned to date and a look at the remaining challenges: the unpleasant reality that state-of-the-art tools are not yet able to boost the productivity of edutainment authors

Deep Reinforcement Learning for Dialogue Generation

Recent neural models of dialogue generation offer great promise for generating responses for conversational agents, but tend to be shortsighted, predicting utterances one at a time while ignoring their influence on future outcomes. Modeling the future direction of a dialogue is crucial to generating coherent, interesting dialogues, a need which led traditional NLP models of dialogue to draw on reinforcement learning. In this paper, we show how to integrate these goals, applying deep reinforcement learning to model future reward in chatbot dialogue. The model simulates dialogues between two virtual agents, using policy gradient methods to reward sequences that display three useful conversational properties: informativity (non-repetitive turns), coherence, and ease of answering (related to forward-looking function). We evaluate our model on diversity, length as well as with human judges, showing that the proposed algorithm generates more interactive responses and manages to foster a more sustained conversation in dialogue simulation. This work marks a first step towards learning a neural conversational model based on the long-term success of dialogues

Wayang Authoring: A Web-based Authoring Tool for Visual Storytelling for Children

This research focuses on the development of the Wayang Authoring tool as it aims to assist children in creating and performing stories, developing an appreciation for cultural artifacts, and enhancing intercultural empathy while building a young storyteller community in a virtual world. This study seeks a framework of interaction design of an authoring media which is appropriate to support children s narrative development. The concept of the tool is based on the narrative element of the ancient Indonesian art form wayang, a traditional two dimensional shadow puppet theater. To understand the user s requirements and the cultural dimension, children and professional story performers who use wayang have been involved in the design process. In order to evaluate the tool, several workshops have been conducted with children from different cultural backgrounds as well as with their teachers. Wayang Authoring is composed of three elements: the imagination-building element, the creative acting element and the social interaction element. Children take existing materials as an inspiration tool, imagine what they themselves want to tell, create a story based on their own ideas, play with their creations, share their stories and creations with others, and reflect on their experiences at the end. This virtual creative production tool is expected to provide a space for young people to change their role from a simple user to a (co-)creator in the virtual and narrative worlds. The core contributions are in the field of web technology for storytelling. The uses of web-based authoring media enable children to put themselves into the process of developing stories. When they are connecting stories, they are connected and immersed with other children as well. They have to act and play by themselves or with others within the stories in order to experience the narratives. They train to have the skills to interact, to share their ideas and to collaborate constructively. This makes it possible for them to participate in today s media-driven culture. This research found that a better understanding of how stories are crafted and brought to life in a performance tradition offers a better design of interaction of an authoring media. The handling of cultural artifacts supports the ability to understand different cultural codes and to pursue the learning process surrounding the original culture behind these artifacts

Comparing System-response Retrieval Models for Open-domain and Casual Conversational Agent

International audienceThis paper studies corpus-based process to select a system-response usable both in chatterbot or as a fallback strategy. It presents, evaluates and compares two selection methods that retrieve and adapt a system-response from the OpenSubtitles2016 corpus given a human-utterance. A corpus of 800 annotated pairs is constituted. Evaluation consists in objective metrics and subjective annotation based on the validity schema proposed in the RE-WOCHAT shared task. Our study indicates that the task of assessing the validity of a system-response given a human-utterance is subjective to an important extent, and is thus a difficult task. Comparisons show that the selection method based on word embedding performs objectively better than the one based on TF-IDF in terms of response variety and response length

Summative Evaluation of Educational Television Material

The following dissertation " Summative Evaluation of Educational Television Material " consists of the following sections: Section I: Chapter 1: Introduction to the problem/task. A brief introduction to the problems of evaluation and research into educational television, with particular reference to the situation in South Africa. A background to the actual evaluation performed is included. Chapter 2: A detailed account of the planning, design, and implementation of a summative evaluation of ETV material. This section is based largely on extracts and recommendations from the available literature, as well as including recommendations and observations by the author. Section II: Chapter 3: A summary of the summative evaluation of Episode 1 and Episode 4 of the SABC ETV series "Statistics". The two episodes are compared under various criteria, particularly the degree to which the goals of the series were attained. This chapter may be taken as an example of a typical summative evaluation. Section III: Chapter 4: A detailed summative evaluation of Episode 1. Chapter 5: A detailed summative evaluation of Episode 4. j Chapter 6: A comparison, summary and recommendations arising out of the evaluations above. Appendix 1: The test instruments used in the evaluation. Appendix 2: A comprehensive abstracts. (A result ERIC databank). Not in the dissertation. list of references and of a literature search on the all the references were used Bibliography: A list of source material used by the author in the dissertation