conversational agent Papers

Conversational agents integrate computational linguistics techniques with the communication channel of the Web to interpret and respond to statements made by users in ordinary natural language. Web-based conversational agents deliver high-volumes of interactive text-based dialogs. Recent years have seen significant activity in enterprise-class conversational agents. This chapter describes the principal applications of conversational agents in the enterprise and the technical challenges posed by their design and large-scale deployments. These technical challenges fall into two categories:... Read more

The paper describes the BotCom complex embedded conversational agent system, which is accessible over the Internet and capable of high quality natural language processing as well as sophisticated manipulation of emotions. It relies on an extension of Plutchik’s emotional model. Experimental cases leading to useful constraints for optimization are discussed. BotCom, a prototype for a robust commercial application, is the outcome of both research and realistic development. Read more

We discuss how simulating emotional dialogs with an Embodied Agent requires endowing it with ability to manifest appropriately emotions but also to exploit them in controlling behavior. We then describe a domain-independent testbed to simulate dialogs in affective domains and verify how they change when the context in which interaction occurs is varied. Emotion activation is simulated by dynamic belief networks while dialog simulation is implemented within a logical framework. Read more

Embodied conversational agents (ECAs) are synthetic characters which can converse with the user (or with other ECAs) by some natural modalities of human-human communication. ECAs have become increasingly popular, as the promising new interface for several traditional computer applications or as the basis for applications in entirely new domains. Much research has been going on to endow ECAs with own behavioral, personality and emotional models, to enable ECAs to act more or less... Read more

This workshop call demonstrates that our field is eager to move beyond first-generation generalist projects, toward a more mature practice. To do so, we seek to set up a common set of expectations and criteria for how to judge our work. In this paper, we propose some subclasses of embodied conversational character research and design, with criteria for describing and evaluating research and design advances in each. We suggest that researchers in this field could benefit from carefully... Read more

Research on embodied conversational agent interfaces has produced widely divergent results. We suggest that this is due to insufficient consideration of key factors that influence the perception and effectiveness of agent-based interfaces. Thus, we propose a framework for the evaluation of conversational agent interfaces that can systematize the research. The framework emphasizes features of the agent, characteristics of the user, and the task the user is performing. We have conducted experiments within this framework. The first study manipulated the agent's... Read more

In this paper, we describe an application of responsive virtual humans to train law enforcement personnel in dealing with subjects that present symptoms of serious mental illness. JUST-TALK provides a computerized virtual person to interact with the student in a role-playing environment. Students were able to converse with the virtual person using spoken natural language and see and hear the virtual human s responses a combination of facial gesture, body movements, and spoken language. The... Read more

How do we decide how to represent an intelligent system in its interface, and how do we decide how the interface represents information about the world and about its own workings to a user? This article addresses these questions by examining the interaction between representation and intelligence in user interfaces. The rubric “representation” covers at least three topics in this context: how a computational system is represented in its user interface, how the interface conveys its representations... Read more

We propose a conversational agent that can act as a virtual representative of a web site interacting with visitors using natural languages. The agent consists of three main components: dialogue act categorization, structured pattern matching, and knowledge construction and representation. Dialogue acts are identified by automata which accept sequences of keywords defined for each of the dialogue acts. We use these DAs to identify the user’s intention. To make the DA analysis process more effective,... Read more

Synthesis of lifelike gesture is finding growing attention in human-computer interaction. In particular, synchronization of synthetic gestures with speech output is one of the goals for embodied conversational agents which have become a new paradigm for the study of gesture and for human-computer interface. In this context, this contribution presents an operational model that enables lifelike gesture animations of an articulated figure to be rendered in real time from representations of spatiotemporal gesture knowledge. Based... Read more