3,313 research outputs found
Affect and Metaphor Sensing in Virtual Drama
We report our developments on metaphor and affect sensing for several metaphorical language phenomena including affects as external entities metaphor, food metaphor, animal metaphor, size metaphor, and anger metaphor. The metaphor and affect sensing component has been embedded in a conversational intelligent agent interacting with human users under loose scenarios. Evaluation for the detection of several metaphorical language phenomena and affect is provided. Our paper contributes to the journal themes on believable virtual characters in real-time narrative environment, narrative in digital games and storytelling and educational gaming with social software
A Virtual Conversational Agent for Teens with Autism: Experimental Results and Design Lessons
We present the design of an online social skills development interface for
teenagers with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). The interface is intended to
enable private conversation practice anywhere, anytime using a web-browser.
Users converse informally with a virtual agent, receiving feedback on nonverbal
cues in real-time, and summary feedback. The prototype was developed in
consultation with an expert UX designer, two psychologists, and a pediatrician.
Using the data from 47 individuals, feedback and dialogue generation were
automated using a hidden Markov model and a schema-driven dialogue manager
capable of handling multi-topic conversations. We conducted a study with nine
high-functioning ASD teenagers. Through a thematic analysis of post-experiment
interviews, identified several key design considerations, notably: 1) Users
should be fully briefed at the outset about the purpose and limitations of the
system, to avoid unrealistic expectations. 2) An interface should incorporate
positive acknowledgment of behavior change. 3) Realistic appearance of a
virtual agent and responsiveness are important in engaging users. 4)
Conversation personalization, for instance in prompting laconic users for more
input and reciprocal questions, would help the teenagers engage for longer
terms and increase the system's utility
Overview of VideoCLEF 2008: Automatic generation of topic-based feeds for dual language audio-visual content
The VideoCLEF track, introduced in 2008, aims to develop and evaluate tasks related to analysis of and access to multilingual multimedia content. In its first year, VideoCLEF piloted the Vid2RSS task, whose main subtask was the classification of dual language video (Dutchlanguage
television content featuring English-speaking experts and studio guests). The task offered two additional discretionary subtasks: feed translation and automatic keyframe extraction. Task participants were supplied with Dutch archival metadata, Dutch speech transcripts,
English speech transcripts and 10 thematic category labels, which they were required to assign to the test set videos. The videos were grouped by class label into topic-based RSS-feeds, displaying title, description and keyframe for each video. Five groups participated in the 2008 VideoCLEF track. Participants were required to collect their own training data; both Wikipedia and general web content were used. Groups deployed various classifiers (SVM, Naive Bayes and k-NN) or treated the problem as an information retrieval task. Both the Dutch speech transcripts and the archival metadata performed well as sources of indexing features, but no group succeeded in exploiting combinations of feature sources to significantly enhance performance. A small scale fluency/adequacy evaluation of the translation task output revealed the translation to be of sufficient quality to make it valuable to a non-Dutch speaking English speaker. For keyframe extraction, the strategy chosen was
to select the keyframe from the shot with the most representative speech transcript content. The automatically selected shots were shown, with a small user study, to be competitive with manually selected shots. Future years of VideoCLEF will aim to expand the corpus and the class label list, as well as to extend the track to additional tasks
Focused Crawling and Model Evaluation in the field of Conversational Agents and Motivational Interviewing
The exploitation of Motivational Interviewing concepts when analysing individuals’ speech contributes to gaining
valuable insights into their perspectives and attitudes towards
behaviour change. The scarcity of labelled user data poses
a persistent challenge and impedes technical advancements
in research in non-English language scenarios. To address
the limitations of manual data labelling, we propose a semisupervised learning method as a means to augment an existing
training corpus. Our approach leverages machine-translated
user-generated data sourced from social media communities
and employs self-training techniques for annotation. We conduct an evaluation of multiple classifiers trained on various
augmented datasets. To that end, we consider diverse source
contexts and employ different effectiveness metrics. The results
indicate that this weak labelling approach does not yield significant improvements in the overall classification capabilities
of the models. However, notable enhancements were observed
for the minority classes. As part of future work, we propose
to enlarge the datasets only with new examples from the
minority classes. We conclude that several factors, including
the quality of machine translation, can potentially bias the
pseudo-labelling models. The imbalanced nature of the data
and the impact of a strict pre-filtering threshold are other
important aspects that need to be taken into account.Universidade de Santiago de Compostela. Escola Técnica Superior de Enxeñarí
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