85 research outputs found
Debbie, the Debate Bot of the Future
Chatbots are a rapidly expanding application of dialogue systems with
companies switching to bot services for customer support, and new applications
for users interested in casual conversation. One style of casual conversation
is argument, many people love nothing more than a good argument. Moreover,
there are a number of existing corpora of argumentative dialogues, annotated
for agreement and disagreement, stance, sarcasm and argument quality. This
paper introduces Debbie, a novel arguing bot, that selects arguments from
conversational corpora, and aims to use them appropriately in context. We
present an initial working prototype of Debbie, with some preliminary
evaluation and describe future work.Comment: IWSDS 201
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
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