Explorations in engagement for humans and robots

This paper explores the concept of engagement, the process by which individuals in an interaction start, maintain and end their perceived connection to one another. The paper reports on one aspect of engagement among human interactors--the effect of tracking faces during an interaction. It also describes the architecture of a robot that can participate in conversational, collaborative interactions with engagement gestures. Finally, the paper reports on findings of experiments with human participants who interacted with a robot when it either performed or did not perform engagement gestures. Results of the human-robot studies indicate that people become engaged with robots: they direct their attention to the robot more often in interactions where engagement gestures are present, and they find interactions more appropriate when engagement gestures are present than when they are not.Comment: 31 pages, 5 figures, 3 table

Models of Plans to Support Communication: An Initial Report

Agents collaborating to achieve a goal bring to their joint activity different beliefs about ways in which to achieve the goal and the actions necessary for doing so. Thus, a model of collaboration must provide a way of representing and distinguishing among agents’ beliefs and of stating the ways in which the intentions of different agents contribute to achieving their goal. Furthermore, in collaborative activity, collaboration occurs in the planning process itself. Thus, rather than modelling plan recognition, per se, what must be modelled is the augmentation of beliefs about the actions of multiple agents and their intentions. In this paper, we modify and expand the SharedPlan model of collaborative behavior (Grosz and Sidner 1990). We present an algorithm for updating an agent’s beliefs about a partial SharedPlan and describe an initial implementation of this algorithm in the domain of network management.Engineering and Applied Science

AsapRealizer 2.0: The Next Steps in Fluent Behavior Realization for ECAs

van Welbergen H, Yaghoubzadeh R, Kopp S. AsapRealizer 2.0: The Next Steps in Fluent Behavior Realization for ECAs. In: Bickmore T, Marsella S, Sidner C, eds. Intelligent Virtual Agents. Lecture Notes in Computer Science. Vol 8637. Cham: Springer International Publishing; 2014: 449-462.Natural human interaction is highly dynamic and responsive: interlocutors produce utterances incrementally, smoothly switch speaking turns with virtually no delay, make use of on-the-fly adaptation and (self) interruptions, execute movement in tight synchrony, etc. We present the conglomeration of our research efforts in enabling the realization of such fluent interactions for Embodied Conversational Agents in the behavior realizer ‘AsapRealizer 2.0’ and show how it provides fluent realization capabilities that go beyond the state-of-the-art

A Progress Report on the Discourse and Reference Components of PAL

This paper reports on research being conducted on a computer assistant, called PAL. PAL is being designed to arrange various kinds of events with concern for the who, what, when, where and why of that event. The goal for PAL is to permit a speaker to interact with it in English and to use extended discourse to state the speaker's requirements. The portion of the language system discussed in this report disambiguates references from discourse and interprets the purpose of sentences of the discourse. PAL uses the focus of discourse to direct its attention to a portion of the discourse and to the database to which the discourse refers. The focus makes it possible to disambiguate references with minimal search. Focus and a frames representation of the discourse make it possible to interpret discourse purposes. The focus and representation of the discourse are explained, and the computational components of PAL which implement reference disambiguation and discourse interpretation are presented in detail

An Artificial Discourse Language for Collaborative Negotiation

Collaborations to accomplish common goals necessitate negotiation to share and reach agreement on the beliefs that agents hold as part of the collaboration. Negotiation in communication can be simulated by a series of exchanges in which agents propose, reject, counterpropose or seek supporting information for beliefs they wish to be held mutually. In an artificial language of negotiation, messages display the state of the agents' beliefs. Dialogues consisting of such messages clarify the means by which agents come to agree or fail to agree on mutual beliefs and individual intentions. Introduction In human problem solving, agents often recognize that they share goals in common. To achieve their common goals, they plan and act jointly. These activities are collaborative processes. Collaboration requires negotiation, that is, the interactive process of attempting to agree on the goals, actions and beliefs that comprise the planning and acting decisions of the collaboration. This paper re..

Towards a Computational Theory of Definite Anaphora Comprehension in English Discourse

This report investigates the process of focussing as a description and explanation of the comprehension of certain anaphoric expressions in English discourse. The investigation centers on the interpretation of definite anaphora, that is, on the personal pronouns, and noun phrases used with a definite article the, this or that. Focussing is formalized as a process in which a speaker centers attention on a particular aspect of the discourse. An algorithmic description specifies what the speaker can focus on and how the speaker may change the focus of the discourse as the discourse unfolds. The algorithm allows for a simple focussing mechanism to be constructed: and element in focus, an ordered collection of alternate foci, and a stack of old foci. The data structure for the element in focus is a representation which encodes a limted set of associations between it and other elements from teh discourse as well as from general knowledge

Hosting Activities: Experience with and Future Directions for a Robot Agent Host

This paper discusses hosting activities. Hosting activities are a general class of collaborative activity in which an agent provides guidance in the form of information, entertainment, education or other services in the user’s environment (which may be an artificial or the natural world) and may also request that the human user undertake actions to support the fulfillment of those services. This paper reports on experience in building a robot agent for hosting activities, both the architecture and applications being used. The paper then turns to a range of issues to be addressed in creating hosting agents, especially robotic ones. The issues include the tasks and capabilities needed for hosting agents, and social relations, especially human trust of agent hosts. Lastly the paper proposes a new evaluation metric for hosting agents

Building Spoken Language Collaborative Interface Agents

This article reports on experiences with collaborative interface agents using spoken dialogue to collaborate with users working with graphical user interface applications. Collaborative interface agents provide users with the means to manage tasks and leave many of the details to the agent. The article presents four different collaborative agents and associated applications. It reports on lessons learned in building these agents, including the importance of choosing tasks that relieve the user of unnecessary detail, and providing speech capabilities that are useable for a wide range of users. In particular, the article reports on the success in developing a subset language for speech understanding in one of the agents. Finally, the article discusses the advantages of using the explanation capabilities in collaborative agents to help users learn new interface functionality