17,910 research outputs found
Evorus: A Crowd-powered Conversational Assistant Built to Automate Itself Over Time
Crowd-powered conversational assistants have been shown to be more robust
than automated systems, but do so at the cost of higher response latency and
monetary costs. A promising direction is to combine the two approaches for high
quality, low latency, and low cost solutions. In this paper, we introduce
Evorus, a crowd-powered conversational assistant built to automate itself over
time by (i) allowing new chatbots to be easily integrated to automate more
scenarios, (ii) reusing prior crowd answers, and (iii) learning to
automatically approve response candidates. Our 5-month-long deployment with 80
participants and 281 conversations shows that Evorus can automate itself
without compromising conversation quality. Crowd-AI architectures have long
been proposed as a way to reduce cost and latency for crowd-powered systems;
Evorus demonstrates how automation can be introduced successfully in a deployed
system. Its architecture allows future researchers to make further innovation
on the underlying automated components in the context of a deployed open domain
dialog system.Comment: 10 pages. To appear in the Proceedings of the Conference on Human
Factors in Computing Systems 2018 (CHI'18
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Mobile Informal Language Learning: Exploring Welsh Learners’ Practices
Mobile devices have great potential in supporting language learning, through providing access to vocabulary, lessons and resources, and supporting interactions with other speakers. There may be particular advantages, however, in using such technologies for
learning minority languages.
Welsh is a minority UK language spoken by around 611,000 people in Wales and there is considerable interest among adults in Wales and from Welsh families in learning Welsh. However the small numbers of speakers and their uneven distribution make it difficult for learners outside Welsh speaking “hotspots” to hear and practice Welsh.
Mobile learning therefore has great potential for Welsh learners by providing resources wherever the learner is and by supporting web-based learning communities. The study reported here investigates whether this potential is being exploited in practice. It employed interviews and a small survey to study the practices of Welsh learners at all levels. It was found that learners used mobile technologies widely, to access a wide range of resources, although not always on-the-move, and also that many were using courses, in particular one online course. Learners’ practices in using digital technologies for their Welsh language learning are discussed, and also the implications for both learning other minority languages and for informal mobile learning more generally
A Personalized System for Conversational Recommendations
Searching for and making decisions about information is becoming increasingly
difficult as the amount of information and number of choices increases.
Recommendation systems help users find items of interest of a particular type,
such as movies or restaurants, but are still somewhat awkward to use. Our
solution is to take advantage of the complementary strengths of personalized
recommendation systems and dialogue systems, creating personalized aides. We
present a system -- the Adaptive Place Advisor -- that treats item selection as
an interactive, conversational process, with the program inquiring about item
attributes and the user responding. Individual, long-term user preferences are
unobtrusively obtained in the course of normal recommendation dialogues and
used to direct future conversations with the same user. We present a novel user
model that influences both item search and the questions asked during a
conversation. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our system in significantly
reducing the time and number of interactions required to find a satisfactory
item, as compared to a control group of users interacting with a non-adaptive
version of the system
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Electronic literacy with and attitudes towards the web as a resource for foreign language learning
About the book: This collection of papers aims at being the connecting link between their knowledge base and language as the main tool for achieving their aims and objectives. Internet in LSP and Foreign Language Teaching contains stimulating practical examples to achieve both academic and professional success, and it raises issues of concern in the field of English for Professional and Academic Purposes
Designing Interfaces for Human-Computer Communication: An On-Going Collection of Considerations
While we do not always use words, communicating what we want to an AI is a
conversation -- with ourselves as well as with it, a recurring loop with
optional steps depending on the complexity of the situation and our request.
Any given conversation of this type may include: (a) the human forming an
intent, (b) the human expressing that intent as a command or utterance, (c) the
AI performing one or more rounds of inference on that command to resolve
ambiguities and/or requesting clarifications from the human, (d) the AI showing
the inferred meaning of the command and/or its execution on current and future
situations or data, (e) the human hopefully correctly recognizing whether the
AI's interpretation actually aligns with their intent. In the process, they may
(f) update their model of the AI's capabilities and characteristics, (g) update
their model of the situations in which the AI is executing its interpretation
of their intent, (h) confirm or refine their intent, and (i) revise their
expression of their intent to the AI, where the loop repeats until the human is
satisfied. With these critical cognitive and computational steps within this
back-and-forth laid out as a framework, it is easier to anticipate where
communication can fail, and design algorithms and interfaces that ameliorate
those failure points
ECA gesture strategies for robust SLDSs
This paper explores the use of embodied conversational agents (ECAs) to improve interaction with spoken language dialogue systems (SLDSs). For this purpose we have identified typical interaction problems with SLDSs and associated with each of them a particular ECA gesture or behaviour. User tests were carried out dividing the test users into two groups, each facing a different interaction metaphor (one with an ECA in the interface, and the other implemented only with voice). Our results suggest user frustration is lower when an ECA is present in the interface, and the dialogue flows more smoothly, partly due to the fact that users are better able to tell when they are expected to speak and whether the system has heard and understood. The users’ overall perceptions regarding the system were also affected, and interaction seems to be more enjoyable with an ECA than without it
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