25,507 research outputs found
Multimodal agent interfaces and system architectures for health and fitness companions
Multimodal conversational spoken dialogues using physical and virtual agents provide a potential interface to motivate and support users in the domain of health and fitness. In this paper we present how such multimodal conversational Companions can be implemented to support their owners in various pervasive and mobile settings. In particular, we focus on different forms of multimodality and system architectures for such interfaces
Improving Search through A3C Reinforcement Learning based Conversational Agent
We develop a reinforcement learning based search assistant which can assist
users through a set of actions and sequence of interactions to enable them
realize their intent. Our approach caters to subjective search where the user
is seeking digital assets such as images which is fundamentally different from
the tasks which have objective and limited search modalities. Labeled
conversational data is generally not available in such search tasks and
training the agent through human interactions can be time consuming. We propose
a stochastic virtual user which impersonates a real user and can be used to
sample user behavior efficiently to train the agent which accelerates the
bootstrapping of the agent. We develop A3C algorithm based context preserving
architecture which enables the agent to provide contextual assistance to the
user. We compare the A3C agent with Q-learning and evaluate its performance on
average rewards and state values it obtains with the virtual user in validation
episodes. Our experiments show that the agent learns to achieve higher rewards
and better states.Comment: 17 pages, 7 figure
Sharing Human-Generated Observations by Integrating HMI and the Semantic Sensor Web
Current âInternet of Thingsâ concepts point to a future where connected objects gather meaningful information about their environment and share it with other objects and people. In particular, objects embedding Human Machine Interaction (HMI), such as mobile devices and, increasingly, connected vehicles, home appliances, urban interactive infrastructures, etc., may not only be conceived as sources of sensor information, but, through interaction with their users, they can also produce highly valuable context-aware human-generated observations. We believe that the great promise offered by combining and sharing all of the different sources of information available can be realized through the integration of HMI and Semantic Sensor Web technologies. This paper presents a technological framework that harmonizes two of the most influential HMI and Sensor Web initiatives: the W3Câs Multimodal Architecture and Interfaces (MMI) and the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) Sensor Web Enablement (SWE) with its semantic extension, respectively. Although the proposed framework is general enough to be applied in a variety of connected objects integrating HMI, a particular development is presented for a connected car scenario where driversâ observations about the traffic or their environment are shared across the Semantic Sensor Web. For implementation and evaluation purposes an on-board OSGi (Open Services Gateway Initiative) architecture was built, integrating several available HMI, Sensor Web and Semantic Web technologies. A technical performance test and a conceptual validation of the scenario with potential users are reported, with results suggesting the approach is soun
Energy-based Self-attentive Learning of Abstractive Communities for Spoken Language Understanding
Abstractive community detection is an important spoken language understanding
task, whose goal is to group utterances in a conversation according to whether
they can be jointly summarized by a common abstractive sentence. This paper
provides a novel approach to this task. We first introduce a neural contextual
utterance encoder featuring three types of self-attention mechanisms. We then
train it using the siamese and triplet energy-based meta-architectures.
Experiments on the AMI corpus show that our system outperforms multiple
energy-based and non-energy based baselines from the state-of-the-art. Code and
data are publicly available.Comment: Update baseline
Towards a Knowledge Graph based Speech Interface
Applications which use human speech as an input require a speech interface
with high recognition accuracy. The words or phrases in the recognised text are
annotated with a machine-understandable meaning and linked to knowledge graphs
for further processing by the target application. These semantic annotations of
recognised words can be represented as a subject-predicate-object triples which
collectively form a graph often referred to as a knowledge graph. This type of
knowledge representation facilitates to use speech interfaces with any spoken
input application, since the information is represented in logical, semantic
form, retrieving and storing can be followed using any web standard query
languages. In this work, we develop a methodology for linking speech input to
knowledge graphs and study the impact of recognition errors in the overall
process. We show that for a corpus with lower WER, the annotation and linking
of entities to the DBpedia knowledge graph is considerable. DBpedia Spotlight,
a tool to interlink text documents with the linked open data is used to link
the speech recognition output to the DBpedia knowledge graph. Such a
knowledge-based speech recognition interface is useful for applications such as
question answering or spoken dialog systems.Comment: Under Review in International Workshop on Grounding Language
Understanding, Satellite of Interspeech 201
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