conversational agent Papers

When building conversational agents that are to take part in social interaction with humans, an important question is whether psychological concepts like emotions or personality of the agents need to be incorporated. In this chapter we argue for the integration of an emotion system into a conversational agent to enable the simulation of having “own emotions”. We first clarify the concept of emotions and we discuss different approaches to modeling emotions and personality in artificial systems.... Read more

In this paper we wish to describe special version of Ivona Speech Synthesis System with US English voice developed in IVO Software for The Blizzard Challenge 2007. Current system is based on improved speech synthesis technique originally developed for the previous challenge - The Blizzard Challenge 2006. An evaluation made by different Blizzard listeners groups, which gave the highest Mean Opinion Score to Ivona shows us, that nowadays Ivona is one of the top of... Read more

An experimental approach was used to compare two types of web interfaces (text-based vs. conversation-based) to content on the life and theories of Jean Piaget. The content in each interface was identical with the exception of third- vs. first-person references. Fifty-nine students in psychology first completed a pretest of Piagetian knowledge and then were randomly assigned to one of the two interfaces. After 20 minutes of review/conversation, students completed a 35-item exam designed to measure... Read more

We aim at defining conversational agents that exhibit qualitatively distinctive behaviors. To this aim we provide a small set of parameters to allow one to define behavior profiles and then leave to the system the task of animating the agent. Our approach is to manipulate the behavior tendency of the agent depending on its communicative intention and emotional state. In this paper we will define the concepts of Baseline and Dynamicline. The Baseline of an agent... Read more

Against the background that recent studies on embodied conversational agents demonstrate the importance of their behavior, an experimental study is presented that assessed the effects of different nonverbal behaviors of an embodied conversational agent on the experiences and evaluations of the user as well as on their behavior. 50 participants conducted a conversation with different versions of the virtual agent Max, whose nonverbal communication was manipulated with regard to eyebrow movements and self-touching gestures. In... Read more

The evaluation of conversational agents or chatterbots question answering systems is a major research area that needs much attention. Before the rise of domain-oriented conversational agents based on natural language understanding and reasoning, evaluation is never a problem as information retrieval-based metrics are readily available for use. However, when chatterbots began to become more domain specific, evaluation becomes a real issue. This is especially true when understanding and reasoning is required to cater for a... Read more

This paper presents some insights into the effect of ‘virtual gender’ on the way people interact with, make sense of, and build relationships with conversational agents. The focus is on the linkage between sex stereotypes and aggression, in the form of verbal abuse towards the machine. Implications for design of embodied conversational agents are discussed. Read more

How does one go about designing a human? With the rise in recent years of virtual humans this is no longer purely a philosophical question. Virtual humans are intelligent agents with a body, often a human-like graphical body, that interact verbally and non-verbally with human users on a variety of tasks and applications. At a recent meeting on this subject, the above authors participated in a several day discussion on the question of virtual human... Read more

"Narrative" is one of key words in the modern society. Giddens pointed out a central role of narratives of the self in some literatures on self-actualization in the late modern society. Kobayashi claimed that there are increasing people trying to write life histories of themselves, and industries aiming at satisfying demand of these people like manuals for making narratives of selves, publishers, and so on, called "narrative industries", have appeared. There is a possibility that... Read more

This paper argues that social intelligence is a critical component of any conversational agent. Conversational interfaces with a sense of social identity circumvent several of problems that commonly arise, and such agents can promote ease-of-use, encourage engagement, and naturally set limits. The paper explores these issues by retrospectively analysing two sets of wizard-of-Oz experiments in the light of the social intelligence concept. In these experiments, the wizards employed simple social strategies to deal with ‘difficult’... Read more