Extraction of affective components from texts and their use in natural language dialogue systems

We are carrying out a research in the field of Human Computer Interaction and developing a natural language dialogue system in Hungarian. In the beginning chapters we briefly describe the architecture of our dialogue system, BotCom with examples of its semantic processing capabilities. We give examples of how the system is handling the topics of the discussion, how the dialogue history is being used in order to enhance the reply generation. In the subsequent parts we give an overview of the emotional state detecting, processing and generating module, called GALA, which is founded on the grounds of Robert Plutchik's emotional model. We show how BotCom is utilizing the detected emotional loads of the user's messages, therefore enabling the chatterbot to give relevant answers both semantically and affectively. In the final chapter we explain how the database of GALA was filled up with expressions assigned to their emotional loads. We also describe a graphical user interface (GUI) being designed to model the changing emotional loads in dialogues, songs and poems, and how it can be used for the emotional labeling of the phrases

Adaptive Emotional Personality Model based on Fuzzy Logic Interpretation of Five Factor Theory

In recent years, emotional personality has found an important application in the field of human machine interaction. Interesting examples of this domain are computer games, interface agents, human-robot interaction, etc. However, few systems in this area include a model of personality, although it plays an important role in differentiating and determining the way they experience emotions and the way they behave. Personality simulation has always been a complex issue due to the complexity of the human personality itself, and the difficulty to model human psychology on electronic basis. Current efforts for emotion simulation are rather based on predefined set or inputs and its responses or on classical models which are simple approximate and have proven flaws. In this paper an emotional simulation system was presented. It utilizes the latest psychological theories to design a complex dynamic system that reacts to any environment, without being pre-programmed on sets of input. The design was relying on fuzzy logic to simulate human emotional reaction, thus increasing the accuracy by further emulating human brain and removing the pre-defined set of input and its matched output

Creating adaptive and individual personalities in many characters without hand crafting behaviours

Believable characters significantly increase the immersion of users or players in interactive applications. A key component of believable characters is their personality, which has previously been implemented statically using the time consuming task of hand-crafting individuality for each character. Often personality has been modeled based on theories that assume behavior is the same regardless of situation and environment. This paper presents a simple affective and cognitive framework for interactive entertainment characters that allows adaptation of behavior based on the environment and emotions. Different personalities are reflected in behavior preferences which are generated based on individual experience. An initial version of the framework has been implemented in a simple scenario to explore which parameters have the greatest effect on agent diversity

Fully generated scripted dialogue for embodied agents

This paper presents the NECA approach to the generation of dialogues between Embodied Conversational Agents (ECAs). This approach consist of the automated construction of an abstract script for an entire dialogue (cast in terms of dialogue acts), which is incrementally enhanced by a series of modules and finally ''performed'' by means of text, speech and body language, by a cast of ECAs. The approach makes it possible to automatically produce a large variety of highly expressive dialogues, some of whose essential properties are under the control of a user. The paper discusses the advantages and disadvantages of NECA's approach to Fully Generated Scripted Dialogue (FGSD), and explains the main techniques used in the two demonstrators that were built. The paper can be read as a survey of issues and techniques in the construction of ECAs, focusing on the generation of behaviour (i.e., focusing on information presentation) rather than on interpretation

Voice Assistant Personalities for Health Information Seeking

As voice assistants become increasingly popular, attention has been drawn to their personalities and their impact on trust and likeability. While it has been found that assistant personalities that matched their users in personality were more trusted and liked in an automotive context, other assistive situations have yet remained unexplored. This study investigates how the personality of a voice assistant impacts user's perceptions of trust and attractiveness in the context of seeking general health information. A voice assistant prototype, consisting of two different assistant personalities, was designed and tested via a Wizard-of-Oz method. We found that personality did not have an impact on trust and system attractiveness in this context, and that instead of affective cues, users paid more attention to cognitive cues in assessing the voice assistant. Our work holds important lessons for designing voice assistants

Psychological Aspects in lifelike synthetic agents: Towards to the Personality Markup Language (A Brief Survey)

This paper describes how human psychological aspects have been used in lifelike synthetic agents in order to provide believability during the human-computer interaction. We describe a brief survey of applications where Affective Computing Scientists have applied psychological aspects, like Emotion and Personality. Based on those aspects we describe the effort done by Affective Computing scientists in order to create a Markup Language to express and standardize Emotions. Because they have not yet concentrated their effort on Personality, here, we propose a starting point to create a Markup Language to express Personality