21,489 research outputs found
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
Pro-active Meeting Assistants : Attention Please!
This paper gives an overview of pro-active meeting assistants, what they are and when they can be useful. We explain how to develop such assistants with respect to requirement definitions and elaborate on a set of Wizard of Oz experiments, aiming to find out in which form a meeting assistant should operate to be accepted by participants and whether the meeting effectiveness and efficiency can be improved by an assistant at all
Social talk capabilities for dialogue systems
Small talk capabilities are an important but very challenging extension to dialogue systems. Small talk (or “social talk”) refers to a kind of conversation, which does not focus on the exchange of information, but on the negotiation of social roles and situations. The goal of this thesis is to provide knowledge, processes and structures that can be used by dialogue systems to satisfactorily participate in social conversations. For this purpose the thesis presents research in the areas of natural-language understanding, dialogue management and error handling. Nine new models of social talk based on a data analysis of small talk conversations are described. The functionally-motivated and content-abstract models can be used for small talk conversations on various topics. The basic elements of the models consist of dialogue acts for social talk newly developed on basis of social science theory. The thesis also presents some conversation strategies for the treatment of so-called “out-of-domain” (OoD) utterances that can be used to avoid errors in the input understanding of dialogue systems. Additionally, the thesis describes a new extension to dialogue management that flexibly manages interwoven dialogue threads. The small talk models as well as the strategies for handling OoD utterances are encoded as computational dialogue threads
Social talk capabilities for dialogue systems
Small talk capabilities are an important but very challenging extension to dialogue systems. Small talk (or social talk) refers to a kind of conversation, which does not focus on the exchange of information, but on the negotiation of social roles and situations. The goal of this thesis is to provide knowledge, processes and structures that can be used by dialogue systems to satisfactorily participate in social conversations. For this purpose the thesis presents research in the areas of natural-language understanding, dialogue management and error handling. Nine new models of social talk based on a data analysis of small talk conversations are described. The functionally-motivated and content-abstract models can be used for small talk conversations on various topics. The basic elements of the models consist of dialogue acts for social talk newly developed on basis of social science theory. The thesis also presents some conversation strategies for the treatment of so-called out-of-domain (OoD) utterances that can be used to avoid errors in the input understanding of dialogue systems. Additionally, the thesis describes a new extension to dialogue management that flexibly manages interwoven dialogue threads. The small talk models as well as the strategies for handling OoD utterances are encoded as computational dialogue threads
Pro-active Meeting Assistants: Attention Please!
This paper gives an overview of pro-active meeting assistants, what they are and when they can be useful. We explain how to develop such assistants with respect to requirement definitions and elaborate on a set of Wizard of Oz experiments, aiming to find out in which form a meeting assistant should operate to be accepted by participants and whether the meeting effectiveness and efficiency can be improved by an assistant at all. This paper gives an overview of pro-active meeting assistants, what they are and when they can be useful. We explain how to develop such assistants with respect to requirement definitions and elaborate on a set of Wizard of Oz experiments, aiming to find out in which form a meeting assistant should operate to be accepted by participants and whether the meeting effectiveness and efficiency can be improved by an assistant at all
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