Interlocutors-Related and Hearer-Specific Causes of Misunderstanding: Processing Strategy, Confirmation Bias and Weak Vigilance

Noises, similarities between words, slips of the tongue, ambiguities, wrong or false beliefs, lexical deficits, inappropriate inferences, cognitive overload, non-shared knowledge, topic organisation or focusing problems, among others, may cause misunderstanding. While some of these are structural factors, others pertain to the speaker or to both the speaker and the hearer. In addition to stable factors connected with the interlocutors′ communicative abilities, cultural knowledge or patterns of thinking, other less stable factors, such as their personal relationships, psychological states or actions motivated by physiological functions, may also result in communicative problems. This paper considers a series of further factors that may eventually lead to misunderstanding, and which solely pertain to the hearer: processing strategy, confirmation bias and weak vigilance

Computational models of social and emotional turn-taking for embodied conversational agents: a review

The emotional involvement of participants in a conversation not only shows in the words they speak and in the way they speak and gesture but also in their turn-taking behavior. This paper reviews research into computational models of embodied conversational agents. We focus on models for turn-taking management and (social) emotions. We are particularly interested in how in these models emotions of the agent itself and those of the others in uence the agent's turn-taking behavior and vice versa how turn-taking behavior of the partner is perceived by the agent itself. The system of turn-taking rules presented by Sacks, Schegloff and Jefferson (1974) is often a starting point for computational turn-taking models of conversational agents. But emotions have their own rules besides the "one-at-a-time" paradigm of the SSJ system. It turns out that almost without exception computational models of turn-taking behavior that allow "continuous interaction" and "natural turntaking" do not model the underlying psychological, affective, attentional and cognitive processes. They are restricted to rules in terms of a number of supercially observable cues. On the other hand computational models for virtual humans that are based on a functional theory of social emotion do not contain explicit rules on how social emotions affect turn-taking behavior or how the emotional state of the agent is affected by turn-taking behavior of its interlocutors. We conclude with some preliminary ideas on what an architecture for emotional turn-taking should look like and we discuss the challenges in building believable emotional turn-taking agents

Designing Embodied Interactive Software Agents for E-Learning: Principles, Components, and Roles

Embodied interactive software agents are complex autonomous, adaptive, and social software systems with a digital embodiment that enables them to act on and react to other entities (users, objects, and other agents) in their environment through bodily actions, which include the use of verbal and non-verbal communicative behaviors in face-to-face interactions with the user. These agents have been developed for various roles in different application domains, in which they perform tasks that have been assigned to them by their developers or delegated to them by their users or by other agents. In computer-assisted learning, embodied interactive pedagogical software agents have the general task to promote human learning by working with students (and other agents) in computer-based learning environments, among them e-learning platforms based on Internet technologies, such as the Virtual Linguistics Campus (www.linguistics-online.com). In these environments, pedagogical agents provide contextualized, qualified, personalized, and timely assistance, cooperation, instruction, motivation, and services for both individual learners and groups of learners. This thesis develops a comprehensive, multidisciplinary, and user-oriented view of the design of embodied interactive pedagogical software agents, which integrates theoretical and practical insights from various academic and other fields. The research intends to contribute to the scientific understanding of issues, methods, theories, and technologies that are involved in the design, implementation, and evaluation of embodied interactive software agents for different roles in e-learning and other areas. For developers, the thesis provides sixteen basic principles (Added Value, Perceptible Qualities, Balanced Design, Coherence, Consistency, Completeness, Comprehensibility, Individuality, Variability, Communicative Ability, Modularity, Teamwork, Participatory Design, Role Awareness, Cultural Awareness, and Relationship Building) plus a large number of specific guidelines for the design of embodied interactive software agents and their components. Furthermore, it offers critical reviews of theories, concepts, approaches, and technologies from different areas and disciplines that are relevant to agent design. Finally, it discusses three pedagogical agent roles (virtual native speaker, coach, and peer) in the scenario of the linguistic fieldwork classes on the Virtual Linguistics Campus and presents detailed considerations for the design of an agent for one of these roles (the virtual native speaker)

A theoretical and practical approach to a persuasive agent model for change behaviour in oral care and hygiene

There is an increased use of the persuasive agent in behaviour change interventions due to the agent‘s features of sociable, reactive, autonomy, and proactive. However, many interventions have been unsuccessful, particularly in the domain of oral care. The psychological reactance has been identified as one of the major reasons for these unsuccessful behaviour change interventions. This study proposes a formal persuasive agent model that leads to psychological reactance reduction in order to achieve an improved behaviour change intervention in oral care and hygiene. Agent-based simulation methodology is adopted for the development of the proposed model. Evaluation of the model was conducted in two phases that include verification and validation. The verification process involves simulation trace and stability analysis. On the other hand, the validation was carried out using user-centred approach by developing an agent-based application based on belief-desire-intention architecture. This study contributes an agent model which is made up of interrelated cognitive and behavioural factors. Furthermore, the simulation traces provide some insights on the interactions among the identified factors in order to comprehend their roles in behaviour change intervention. The simulation result showed that as time increases, the psychological reactance decreases towards zero. Similarly, the model validation result showed that the percentage of respondents‘ who experienced psychological reactance towards behaviour change in oral care and hygiene was reduced from 100 percent to 3 percent. The contribution made in this thesis would enable agent application and behaviour change intervention designers to make scientific reasoning and predictions. Likewise, it provides a guideline for software designers on the development of agent-based applications that may not have psychological reactance

New Alterities and Emerging Cultures of Social Interaction

Globalization has generated increased societal heterogeneity and awakened interest of a new kind in social cohesion and integration. But globalization is not the only contemporary process to give rise to societal hybridization. Two other such processes - much less attended to in the theoretical debate but no less problematic as regards social integration - are societal ageing and robotization. Drawing on statistical estimates, this paper begins by assessing the relevance of these new processes of hybridization. The predictions in question indicate that in the near future, everyday interaction, not just with cultural strangers and 'intelligent' machines, but also with people suffering from dementia, will be an omnipresent phenomenon, confronting our societies with types and degrees of alterity never before encountered. Whereas contact with cultural strangers is to some extent familiar (though not yet taken as standard), interaction with intelligent technological devices and dementia sufferers represent new forms of alterity for which most societies have not yet established routines of conduct. This paper gives a detailed account of a number of empirical studies showing how new forms of hybrid interaction and cooperation evolve out of repeated contact with each of the three alterities. With this groundwork in place, the paper then attempts to identify not only the ways in which routines may develop out of interaction with the three alterities but also the trends towards, and prerequisites for, the emergence of a new culture of cooperation and interaction

Contextual Factors Affecting Information Sharing Patterns in Technology Mediated Communication

In this thesis, we investigate how and what contextual factors affect user’s information sharing. We build our work on six individual research projects which cover a variety of systems (search engines, social network sites, teleconferencing systems, monitoring technology, and general purpose conversational agents) in a variety of communication scenarios with diverse relationships and dispositions of users. Alongside detailed findings for particular systems and communication scenarios from each individual project, we provide a consolidated analysis of these results across systems and scenarios, which allows us to identify patterns specific for different system types and aspects shared between systems. In particular, we show that depending on the system’s position between a user and an intended information receiving agent – whether communication happens through, around, or directly with the system – the system should have different patterns of operational adaptation to communication context. Specifically, when communication happens through the system, the system needs to gather communication context unavailable to the user and integrate it into information communication; when communication happens around the system, the system should adapt its operations to provide information in the most contextually suitable format; finally, when a user communicates with the system, the role of the system is to “match” this context in communication with the user. We then argue that despite the differences between system types in patterns of required context-based adaptation, there are contextual factors affecting user’s information sharing intent that should be acknowledged across systems. Grounded in our cumulative findings and analysis of related literature, we identify four such high-level contextual factors. We then present these four factors synthesized into an early design framework, which we call SART according to the included factors of space, addressee, reason, and time. Each factor in SART is presented as a continuum defined through a descriptive dichotomy: perceived breadth of communication space (public to private); perceived specificity of an information addressee (defined to undefined); intended reason for information sharing (instrumental to objective); and perceived time of information relevance and life-span (immediate to indefinite)

A study of the use of natural language processing for conversational agents

Language is a mark of humanity and conscience, with the conversation (or dialogue) as one of the most fundamental manners of communication that we learn as children. Therefore one way to make a computer more attractive for interaction with users is through the use of natural language. Among the systems with some degree of language capabilities developed, the Eliza chatterbot is probably the first with a focus on dialogue. In order to make the interaction more interesting and useful to the user there are other approaches besides chatterbots, like conversational agents. These agents generally have, to some degree, properties like: a body (with cognitive states, including beliefs, desires and intentions or objectives); an interactive incorporation in the real or virtual world (including perception of events, communication, ability to manipulate the world and communicate with others); and behavior similar to a human (including affective abilities). This type of agents has been called by several terms, including animated agents or embedded conversational agents (ECA). A dialogue system has six basic components. (1) The speech recognition component is responsible for translating the user’s speech into text. (2) The Natural Language Understanding component produces a semantic representation suitable for dialogues, usually using grammars and ontologies. (3) The Task Manager chooses the concepts to be expressed to the user. (4) The Natural Language Generation component defines how to express these concepts in words. (5) The dialog manager controls the structure of the dialogue. (6) The synthesizer is responsible for translating the agents answer into speech. However, there is no consensus about the necessary resources for developing conversational agents and the difficulties involved (especially in resource-poor languages). This work focuses on the influence of natural language components (dialogue understander and manager) and analyses, in particular the use of parsing systems as part of developing conversational agents with more flexible language capabilities. This work analyses what kind of parsing resources contributes to conversational agents and discusses how to develop them targeting Portuguese, which is a resource-poor language. To do so we analyze approaches to the understanding of natural language, and identify parsing approaches that offer good performance, based on which we develop a prototype to evaluate the impact of using a parser in a conversational agent.linguagem é uma marca da humanidade e da consciência, sendo a conversação (ou diálogo) uma das maneiras de comunicacão mais fundamentais que aprendemos quando crianças. Por isso uma forma de fazer um computador mais atrativo para interação com usuários é usando linguagem natural. Dos sistemas com algum grau de capacidade de linguagem desenvolvidos, o chatterbot Eliza é, provavelmente, o primeiro sistema com foco em diálogo. Com o objetivo de tornar a interação mais interessante e útil para o usuário há outras aplicações alem de chatterbots, como agentes conversacionais. Estes agentes geralmente possuem, em algum grau, propriedades como: corpo (com estados cognitivos, incluindo crenças, desejos e intenções ou objetivos); incorporação interativa no mundo real ou virtual (incluindo percepções de eventos, comunicação, habilidade de manipular o mundo e comunicar com outros agentes); e comportamento similar ao humano (incluindo habilidades afetivas). Este tipo de agente tem sido chamado de diversos nomes como agentes animados ou agentes conversacionais incorporados. Um sistema de diálogo possui seis componentes básicos. (1) O componente de reconhecimento de fala que é responsável por traduzir a fala do usuário em texto. (2) O componente de entendimento de linguagem natural que produz uma representação semântica adequada para diálogos, normalmente utilizando gramáticas e ontologias. (3) O gerenciador de tarefa que escolhe os conceitos a serem expressos ao usuário. (4) O componente de geração de linguagem natural que define como expressar estes conceitos em palavras. (5) O gerenciador de diálogo controla a estrutura do diálogo. (6) O sintetizador de voz é responsável por traduzir a resposta do agente em fala. No entanto, não há consenso sobre os recursos necessários para desenvolver agentes conversacionais e a dificuldade envolvida nisso (especialmente em línguas com poucos recursos disponíveis). Este trabalho foca na influência dos componentes de linguagem natural (entendimento e gerência de diálogo) e analisa em especial o uso de sistemas de análise sintática (parser) como parte do desenvolvimento de agentes conversacionais com habilidades de linguagem mais flexível. Este trabalho analisa quais os recursos do analisador sintático contribuem para agentes conversacionais e aborda como os desenvolver, tendo como língua alvo o português (uma língua com poucos recursos disponíveis). Para isto, analisamos as abordagens de entendimento de linguagem natural e identificamos as abordagens de análise sintática que oferecem um bom desempenho. Baseados nesta análise, desenvolvemos um protótipo para avaliar o impacto do uso de analisador sintático em um agente conversacional