Enabling robust and fluid spoken dialogue with cognitively impaired users

Yaghoubzadeh R, Kopp S. Enabling robust and fluid spoken dialogue with cognitively impaired users. In: Proceedings of the 18th Annual SIGdial Meeting on Discourse and Dialogue. Saarbrücken, Germany: Association for Computational Linguistics; 2017: 273--283.We present the flexdiam dialogue management architecture, which was developed in a series of projects dedicated to tailoring spoken interaction to the needs of users with cognitive impairments in an everyday assistive domain, using a multimodal front-end. This hybrid DM architecture affords incremental processing of uncertain input, a flexible, mixed-initiative information grounding process that can be adapted to users' cognitive capacities and interactive idiosyncrasies, and generic mechanisms that foster transitions in the joint discourse state that are understandable and controllable by those users, in order to effect a robust interaction for users with varying capacities. [Link to poster and supplemental materials](https://purl.org/net/ramin/sigdial2017

flexdiam – flexible dialogue management for problem-aware, incremental spoken interaction for all user groups (demo paper)

Yaghoubzadeh R, Kopp S. flexdiam – flexible dialogue management for problem-aware, incremental spoken interaction for all user groups (demo paper). In: Proceedings of the 7th Workshop on Speech and Language Processing for Assistive Technologies (SLPAT 2016). 2016: 87-90

Towards graceful turn management in human-agent interaction for people with cognitive impairments

Yaghoubzadeh R, Kopp S. Towards graceful turn management in human-agent interaction for people with cognitive impairments. In: Proceedings of the 7th Workshop on Speech and Language Processing for Assistive Technologies (SLPAT 2016). 2016: 26-31

Socially cooperative behavior for artificial companions for elderly and cognitively impaired people

Yaghoubzadeh R, Buschmeier H, Kopp S. Socially cooperative behavior for artificial companions for elderly and cognitively impaired people. In: Proceedings of the 1st International Symposium on Companion-Technology. Ulm, Germany; 2015: 15-19

The Communicative Activity of “Making Suggestions” as an Interactional Process: Towards a Dialog Model for HAI

Opfermann C, Pitsch K, Yaghoubzadeh R, Kopp S. The Communicative Activity of “Making Suggestions” as an Interactional Process: Towards a Dialog Model for HAI. In: Proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Human Agent Interaction. ACM Press; 2017: 161–170.Dialog modeling of making suggestions in human-agent interaction is a challenge due to the socially delicate nature of a suggestion and ensuing interactional negotiations. A basic first dialog model for making suggestions was tested in the context of schedule management assistance by an embodied conversational agent with elderly and mildly cognitively impaired persons. Analysis showed that users responded according to human social structures with most response types bearing potential challenges concerning the system's language understanding and the users' intention interpretation:next to explicit answers, users produced implicit versions for acceptance or resistance and further requests for information or modifications. Thus, an enhanced dialog model with a newly added clarification sequence and a new multi-conditional entry sequence was tested in a second study with the autonomous system. Initial observations show a promising performance of the dialog model

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

flexdiam – flexible dialogue management for incremental interaction with virtual agents (demo paper)

Yaghoubzadeh R, Kopp S. flexdiam – flexible dialogue management for incremental interaction with virtual agents (demo paper). In: Traum D, Swartout W, Khooshabeh P, Kopp S, Scherer S, Leuski A, eds. Proceedings of the 16th International Conference on Intelligent Virtual Agents (IVA 2016). LNCS (LNAI). Vol 10011. Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer; 2016: 476-479

Conversational Assistants for Elderly Users – The Importance of Socially Cooperative Dialogue

Kopp S, Brandt M, Buschmeier H, et al. Conversational Assistants for Elderly Users – The Importance of Socially Cooperative Dialogue. In: André E, Bickmore T, Vrochidis S, Wanner L, eds. Proceedings of the AAMAS Workshop on Intelligent Conversation Agents in Home and Geriatric Care Applications co-located with the Federated AI Meeting. CEUR Workshop Proceedings. Vol 2338. Aachen: RWTH; 2018: 10–17.Conversational agents can provide valuable cognitive and/or emotional assistance to elderly users or people with cognitive impairments who often have difficulties in organizing and following a structured day schedule. Previous research showed that a virtual assistant that can interact in spoken language would be a desirable help for those users. However, these user groups pose specific requirements for spoken dialogue interaction that existing systems hardly meet. This paper presents work on a virtual conversational assistant that was designed for, and together with, elderly as well as cognitively handicapped users. It has been specifically developed to enable ‘socially cooperative dialogue’ – adaptive and aware conversational interaction in which mutual understanding is co-constructed and ensured collaboratively. The technical approach is described and results of evaluation studies are reported