conversational character Papers

The work discussed in this chapter involves a proposal to add human like attributes (emotions in this instance) to characters in games and virtual worlds to enhance user experience. The chapter begins by defining these computer controlled characters in the context of both games and virtual worlds, followed by a discussion on the human like aspects currently being integrated into these characters by developers. The chapter continues by focusing specifically on a particular case study... Read more

We describe work done at three sites on designing conversational agents capable of incremental processing. We focus on the ‘middleware’ layer in these systems, which takes care of passing around and maintaining incremental information between the modules of such agents. All implementations are based on the abstract model of incremental dialogue processing proposed by Schlangen and Skantze (2009), and the paper shows what different instantiations of the model can look like given specific requirements and... Read more

This paper describes the Evolutionary Virtual Agent (EVA) prototype designed as an interactive entertainment system for a multimedia exhibition. This implementation uses a behavioral engine based on a dynamical subsumption architecture and a 3D animated interface that has been projected onto a physical model. 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

During the last decade research groups as well as a number of commercial software developers have started to deploy embodied conversational characters in the user interface especially in those application areas where a close emulation of multimodal human-human communication is needed. Incarnations of such characters differ widely in type and amount of embodiment - starting from simplistic cartoon-style 2D representations of faces, fully embodied virtual humans in 3D virtual worlds to physically embodied androids co-habiting... Read more

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 development of virtual agents running within graphic environments which emulate real-life contexts may largely benefit from the use of visual specification by-example. To support this specification, the development system must be able to interpret the examples and cast their underlying rules into an internal representation language. This language must find a suitable trade-off among a number of contrasting requirements regarding expressiveness, automatic executability, and suitability to the automatic representation of rules deriving from the... 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

People engage in small talk and conversational storytelling to provide information in engaging ways and to serve interpersonal goals such as building rapport and credibility. Embodied conversational interface agents, that represent the computer in its interaction with human users by way of a graphical humanoid body on a screen, can also profitably engage in these behaviors. We describe the ongoing development of an embodied conversational interface agent that is capable of multimodal input understanding and... Read more