Representation of Linguistic and Domain Knowledge for Second Language Learning in Virtual Worlds

International audienceThere has been much debate, both theoretical and practical, on how to link ontologies and lexicons in natural language processing (NLP) applications. In this paper, we focus on an application in which lexicon and ontology are used to generate teaching material. We briefly describe the application (a serious game for language learning). We then zoom in on the representation and interlinking of the lexicon and of the ontology. We show how the use of existing standards and of good practice principles facilitates the design of our resources while satisfying the expressivity requirements set by natural language generation

Listen, Attend, and Walk: Neural Mapping of Navigational Instructions to Action Sequences

We propose a neural sequence-to-sequence model for direction following, a task that is essential to realizing effective autonomous agents. Our alignment-based encoder-decoder model with long short-term memory recurrent neural networks (LSTM-RNN) translates natural language instructions to action sequences based upon a representation of the observable world state. We introduce a multi-level aligner that empowers our model to focus on sentence "regions" salient to the current world state by using multiple abstractions of the input sentence. In contrast to existing methods, our model uses no specialized linguistic resources (e.g., parsers) or task-specific annotations (e.g., seed lexicons). It is therefore generalizable, yet still achieves the best results reported to-date on a benchmark single-sentence dataset and competitive results for the limited-training multi-sentence setting. We analyze our model through a series of ablations that elucidate the contributions of the primary components of our model.Comment: To appear at AAAI 2016 (and an extended version of a NIPS 2015 Multimodal Machine Learning workshop paper

Spectators’ aesthetic experiences of sound and movement in dance performance

In this paper we present a study of spectators’ aesthetic experiences of sound and movement in live dance performance. A multidisciplinary team comprising a choreographer, neuroscientists and qualitative researchers investigated the effects of different sound scores on dance spectators. What would be the impact of auditory stimulation on kinesthetic experience and/or aesthetic appreciation of the dance? What would be the effect of removing music altogether, so that spectators watched dance while hearing only the performers’ breathing and footfalls? We investigated audience experience through qualitative research, using post-performance focus groups, while a separately conducted functional brain imaging (fMRI) study measured the synchrony in brain activity across spectators when they watched dance with sound or breathing only. When audiences watched dance accompanied by music the fMRI data revealed evidence of greater intersubject synchronisation in a brain region consistent with complex auditory processing. The audience research found that some spectators derived pleasure from finding convergences between two complex stimuli (dance and music). The removal of music and the resulting audibility of the performers’ breathing had a significant impact on spectators’ aesthetic experience. The fMRI analysis showed increased synchronisation among observers, suggesting greater influence of the body when interpreting the dance stimuli. The audience research found evidence of similar corporeally focused experience. The paper discusses possible connections between the findings of our different approaches, and considers the implications of this study for interdisciplinary research collaborations between arts and sciences

Towards an Indexical Model of Situated Language Comprehension for Cognitive Agents in Physical Worlds

We propose a computational model of situated language comprehension based on the Indexical Hypothesis that generates meaning representations by translating amodal linguistic symbols to modal representations of beliefs, knowledge, and experience external to the linguistic system. This Indexical Model incorporates multiple information sources, including perceptions, domain knowledge, and short-term and long-term experiences during comprehension. We show that exploiting diverse information sources can alleviate ambiguities that arise from contextual use of underspecific referring expressions and unexpressed argument alternations of verbs. The model is being used to support linguistic interactions in Rosie, an agent implemented in Soar that learns from instruction.Comment: Advances in Cognitive Systems 3 (2014

A model for providing emotion awareness and feedback using fuzzy logic in online learning

Monitoring users’ emotive states and using that information for providing feedback and scaffolding is crucial. In the learning context, emotions can be used to increase students’ attention as well as to improve memory and reasoning. In this context, tutors should be prepared to create affective learning situations and encourage collaborative knowledge construction as well as identify those students’ feelings which hinder learning process. In this paper, we propose a novel approach to label affective behavior in educational discourse based on fuzzy logic, which enables a human or virtual tutor to capture students’ emotions, make students aware of their own emotions, assess these emotions and provide appropriate affective feedback. To that end, we propose a fuzzy classifier that provides a priori qualitative assessment and fuzzy qualifiers bound to the amounts such as few, regular and many assigned by an affective dictionary to every word. The advantage of the statistical approach is to reduce the classical pollution problem of training and analyzing the scenario using the same dataset. Our approach has been tested in a real online learning environment and proved to have a very positive influence on students’ learning performance.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Computer Mediated Communication and the Connection between Virtual Utopias and Actual Realities

People have generally been very ambivalent about the potential future roles of new technologies (and the internet specifically) and their possible effects on human society. Indeed, there has been a tendency for polarization between attitudes or perceptions of naive enthusiasm and cynical resistance towards the use of computers and computer networks, and for such related concepts as ‘the information superhighway’ and ‘cyberspace’. The projection of such ambivalent perceptions into naively utopian (or even ironically dystopian) images and narratives might be seen as the latest and uniquely global permutation of a basic function of human culture - that is, to imagine ‘a better future’ or represent ‘an ideal past’. This paper will consider the extent to which the kinds of virtual utopias made possible by computer-mediated communications are\ud ‘connected’ to the actual individual and social realities of human participants. In other words, how important might it be to recognise a distinction between the use of virtual utopias (and utopian representations in any culture) as merely escapist, self-indulgent fantasy on one hand, and\ud as a useful, transformative media for reinventing the human condition on the other? Whether we live in a Panoptic or democratic Net ten years from now depends, in no small measure, on what you and I know and do now. Howard Rheingold, Afterword to The Virtual Community (1994, p. 310

Reference Resolution in Multi-modal Interaction: Position paper

In this position paper we present our research on multimodal interaction in and with virtual environments. The aim of this presentation is to emphasize the necessity to spend more research on reference resolution in multimodal contexts. In multi-modal interaction the human conversational partner can apply more than one modality in conveying his or her message to the environment in which a computer detects and interprets signals from different modalities. We show some naturally arising problems and how they are treated for different contexts. No generally applicable solutions are given