A system for event-based film browsing

The recent past has seen a proliferation in the amount of digital video content being created and consumed. This is perhaps being driven by the increase in audiovisual quality, as well as the ease with which production, reproduction and consumption is now possible. The widespread use of digital video, as opposed its analogue counterpart, has opened up a plethora of previously impossible applications. This paper builds upon previous work that analysed digital video, namely movies, in order to facilitate presentation in an easily navigable manner. A film browsing interface, termed the MovieBrowser, is described, which allows users to easily locate specific portions of movies, as well as to obtain an understanding of the filming being perused. A number of experiments which assess the system’s performance are also presented

Using multimedia to enhance the accessibility of the learning environment for disabled students: reflections from the Skills for Access project

As educators' awareness of their responsibilities towards ensuring the accessibility of the learning environment to disabled students increases, significant debate surrounds the implications of accessibility requirements on educational multimedia. There would appear to be widespread concern that the fundamental principles of creating accessible web‐based materials seem at odds with the creative and innovative use of multimedia to support learning and teaching, as well as concerns over the time and cost of providing accessibility features that can hold back resource development and application. Yet, effective use of multimedia offers a way of enhancing the accessibility of the learning environment for many groups of disabled students. Using the development of ‘Skills for Access’, a web resource supporting the dual aims of creating optimally accessible multimedia for learning, as an example, the attitudinal, practical and technical challenges facing the effective use of multimedia as an accessibility aid in a learning environment will be explored. Reasons why a holistic approach to accessibility may be the most effective in ensuring that multimedia reaches its full potential in enabling and supporting students in learning, regardless of any disability they may have, will be outlined and discussed

Evaluating embodied conversational agents in multimodal interfaces

Based on cross-disciplinary approaches to Embodied Conversational Agents, evaluation methods for such human-computer interfaces are structured and presented. An introductory systematisation of evaluation topics from a conversational perspective is followed by an explanation of social-psychological phenomena studied in interaction with Embodied Conversational Agents, and how these can be used for evaluation purposes. Major evaluation concepts and appropriate assessment instruments – established and new ones – are presented, including questionnaires, annotations and log-files. An exemplary evaluation and guidelines provide hands-on information on planning and preparing such endeavours

A modified approach of POMDP-based dialogue management

This thesis applies the theory of history information space for a thorough study of dialogue management in major approaches, ranging from the classical approach based upon finite state machine to the most recent approach using partially observable Markov decision process (PODMP). While most of the approaches use various techniques to estimate system state, the POMDP-based approach avoids state estimation and uses belief state for decision making. In addition, it provides a mechanism to model uncertainty and allows for errorrecovery. PODMP-based dialogue management demonstrates undeniable advantages in the handling of input uncertainty over all the other approaches. However, applying Markovian over the belief-state space in the current POMDP models causes significant loss of valuable information in dialogue history, leading to untruthful recognition of user\u27s intention. To improve the performance of POMDP-based dialogue management this thesis introduces belief history into the planning process, and uses not only the current but also the previous belief state for the determination of actions. In the new approach, all changes of belief state require a validation with domain constraints, and an invalid change results in a modification to the actions provided by the POMDP solver. Experiments show that this new approach is able to handle uncertainty caused by user\u27s lack of domain knowledge and practical constraints, thus becoming more accurate in intention recognition

Spoken content retrieval: A survey of techniques and technologies

Speech media, that is, digital audio and video containing spoken content, has blossomed in recent years. Large collections are accruing on the Internet as well as in private and enterprise settings. This growth has motivated extensive research on techniques and technologies that facilitate reliable indexing and retrieval. Spoken content retrieval (SCR) requires the combination of audio and speech processing technologies with methods from information retrieval (IR). SCR research initially investigated planned speech structured in document-like units, but has subsequently shifted focus to more informal spoken content produced spontaneously, outside of the studio and in conversational settings. This survey provides an overview of the field of SCR encompassing component technologies, the relationship of SCR to text IR and automatic speech recognition and user interaction issues. It is aimed at researchers with backgrounds in speech technology or IR who are seeking deeper insight on how these fields are integrated to support research and development, thus addressing the core challenges of SCR

Four Mode Based Dialogue Management with Modified POMDP Model

This thesis proposes a method to manage the interaction between the user and the system dynamically, through speech or text input which updates the user goals, select system actions and calculate rewards for each system response at each time-stamp. The main focus is made on the dialog manager, which decides how to continue the dialogue. We have used POMDP technique, as it maintains a belief distribution on the dialogue states based on the observations over the dialogue even in a noisy environment. Four contextual control modes are introduced in dialogue management for decision-making mechanism, and to keep track of machine behaviour for each dialogue state. The result obtained proves that our proposed framework has overcome the limitations of prior POMDP methods, and exactly understands the actual intention of the users within the available time, providing very interactive conversation between the user and the computer