40,629 research outputs found
Learning About Meetings
Most people participate in meetings almost every day, multiple times a day.
The study of meetings is important, but also challenging, as it requires an
understanding of social signals and complex interpersonal dynamics. Our aim
this work is to use a data-driven approach to the science of meetings. We
provide tentative evidence that: i) it is possible to automatically detect when
during the meeting a key decision is taking place, from analyzing only the
local dialogue acts, ii) there are common patterns in the way social dialogue
acts are interspersed throughout a meeting, iii) at the time key decisions are
made, the amount of time left in the meeting can be predicted from the amount
of time that has passed, iv) it is often possible to predict whether a proposal
during a meeting will be accepted or rejected based entirely on the language
(the set of persuasive words) used by the speaker
I Probe, Therefore I Am: Designing a Virtual Journalist with Human Emotions
By utilizing different communication channels, such as verbal language,
gestures or facial expressions, virtually embodied interactive humans hold a
unique potential to bridge the gap between human-computer interaction and
actual interhuman communication. The use of virtual humans is consequently
becoming increasingly popular in a wide range of areas where such a natural
communication might be beneficial, including entertainment, education, mental
health research and beyond. Behind this development lies a series of
technological advances in a multitude of disciplines, most notably natural
language processing, computer vision, and speech synthesis. In this paper we
discuss a Virtual Human Journalist, a project employing a number of novel
solutions from these disciplines with the goal to demonstrate their viability
by producing a humanoid conversational agent capable of naturally eliciting and
reacting to information from a human user. A set of qualitative and
quantitative evaluation sessions demonstrated the technical feasibility of the
system whilst uncovering a number of deficits in its capacity to engage users
in a way that would be perceived as natural and emotionally engaging. We argue
that naturalness should not always be seen as a desirable goal and suggest that
deliberately suppressing the naturalness of virtual human interactions, such as
by altering its personality cues, might in some cases yield more desirable
results.Comment: eNTERFACE16 proceeding
The Future of Cognitive Strategy-enhanced Persuasive Dialogue Agents: New Perspectives and Trends
Persuasion, as one of the crucial abilities in human communication, has
garnered extensive attention from researchers within the field of intelligent
dialogue systems. We humans tend to persuade others to change their viewpoints,
attitudes or behaviors through conversations in various scenarios (e.g.,
persuasion for social good, arguing in online platforms). Developing dialogue
agents that can persuade others to accept certain standpoints is essential to
achieving truly intelligent and anthropomorphic dialogue system. Benefiting
from the substantial progress of Large Language Models (LLMs), dialogue agents
have acquired an exceptional capability in context understanding and response
generation. However, as a typical and complicated cognitive psychological
system, persuasive dialogue agents also require knowledge from the domain of
cognitive psychology to attain a level of human-like persuasion. Consequently,
the cognitive strategy-enhanced persuasive dialogue agent (defined as
CogAgent), which incorporates cognitive strategies to achieve persuasive
targets through conversation, has become a predominant research paradigm. To
depict the research trends of CogAgent, in this paper, we first present several
fundamental cognitive psychology theories and give the formalized definition of
three typical cognitive strategies, including the persuasion strategy, the
topic path planning strategy, and the argument structure prediction strategy.
Then we propose a new system architecture by incorporating the formalized
definition to lay the foundation of CogAgent. Representative works are detailed
and investigated according to the combined cognitive strategy, followed by the
summary of authoritative benchmarks and evaluation metrics. Finally, we
summarize our insights on open issues and future directions of CogAgent for
upcoming researchers.Comment: 36 pages, 6 figure
CoachAI: A Conversational Agent Assisted Health Coaching Platform
Poor lifestyle represents a health risk factor and is the leading cause of
morbidity and chronic conditions. The impact of poor lifestyle can be
significantly altered by individual behavior change. Although the current shift
in healthcare towards a long lasting modifiable behavior, however, with
increasing caregiver workload and individuals' continuous needs of care, there
is a need to ease caregiver's work while ensuring continuous interaction with
users. This paper describes the design and validation of CoachAI, a
conversational agent assisted health coaching system to support health
intervention delivery to individuals and groups. CoachAI instantiates a text
based healthcare chatbot system that bridges the remote human coach and the
users. This research provides three main contributions to the preventive
healthcare and healthy lifestyle promotion: (1) it presents the conversational
agent to aid the caregiver; (2) it aims to decrease caregiver's workload and
enhance care given to users, by handling (automating) repetitive caregiver
tasks; and (3) it presents a domain independent mobile health conversational
agent for health intervention delivery. We will discuss our approach and
analyze the results of a one month validation study on physical activity,
healthy diet and stress management
A National Dialogue on Health Information Technology and Privacy
Increasingly, government leaders recognize that solving the complex problems facing America today will require more than simply keeping citizens informed. Meeting challenges like rising health care costs, climate change and energy independence requires increased level of collaboration. Traditionally, government agencies have operated in silos -- separated not only from citizens, but from each other, as well. Nevertheless, some have begun to reach across and outside of government to access the collective brainpower of organizations, stakeholders and individuals.The National Dialogue on Health Information Technology and Privacy was one such initiative. It was conceived by leaders in government who sought to demonstrate that it is not only possible, but beneficial and economical, to engage openly and broadly on an issue that is both national in scope and deeply relevant to the everyday lives of citizens. The results of this first-of-its-kind online event are captured in this report, together with important lessons learned along the way.This report served as a call to action. On his first full day in office, President Obama put government on notice that this new, more collaborative model can no longer be confined to the efforts of early adopters. He called upon every executive department and agency to "harness new technology" and make government "transparent, participatory, and collaborative." Government is quickly transitioning to a new generation of managers and leaders, for whom online collaboration is not a new frontier but a fact of everyday life. We owe it to them -- and the citizens we serve -- to recognize and embrace the myriad tools available to fulfill the promise of good government in the 21st Century.Key FindingsThe Panel recommended that the Administration give stakeholders the opportunity to further participate in the discussion of heath IT and privacy through broader outreach and by helping the public to understand the value of a person-centered view of healthcare information technology
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