Papers about Coach

This paper aims to describe a pilot at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln for a chatbot that answers questions about the library and library resources. The chatbot was developed using a SQL database to store the question and answers using artificial intelligence mark-up language metadata. The user interface was built using PHP, adapted from Program-O. The open source PHP program was modified to support better display and the launching of URLs within the chatbot screen. Database content... Read more

Since their development in the 1980’s, Intelligent Tutoring Systems (ITS) have experienced a widespread success in such varying areas of education as military training, personal tutoring, and vocational instruction. ITSs are not without limitations, however, and have often proven to be costly and inflexible. Combining these systems with Intelligent Agents (IA), first proposed in the 1990s, is intended to address some of the shortcomings of ITSs; notably the cost of building new learning objects. While... Read more

This paper seeks to investigate current development and applications of these systems worldwide, while focusing on their availability in Canadian libraries. It aims to argue that it is both timely and conceivable for Canadian libraries to consider adopting conversational agents to enhance – not replace – face-to-face human interaction. Potential users include library web site tour guides, automated virtual reference and readers' advisory librarians, and virtual story-tellers. To provide background and justification for this argument,... Read more

In everyday life, one increasingly encounters virtual characters. Virtual (online) worlds, on the one hand, are populated by avatars, that is, mediated human interlocutors represented by a virtual body. Examples are Second Life or Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games (MMORPG) like World of Warcraft. On the other hand, websites, pedagogical programs, or technological devices are increasingly being equipped with virtual characters programmed to act autonomously and to conduct basic verbal and nonverbal interaction with the... Read more

We examined how the presence and nonverbal communication of an animated pedagogical agent affects students’ perceptions and learning. College students learned about astronomy either without an agent’s image or with an agent under one of the following conditions: a static agent (S), an agent with deictic movements (D), an agent with facial expressions (E), or an agent with both deictic movements and facial expressions (DE). Group S outperformed group E on a comprehension test, but... Read more

Pedagogical agents – lifelike characters that guide users through multimedia learning environments – are intended to facilitate the learning process. According to social agency theory, the presentation of social cues (the image and voice of the agent) may prime the social interaction schema and cause the learner to deeply process the learning material. Research on pedagogical agents focuses mainly on either the role of the presence of pedagogical agents, by comparing agent and no-agent groups,... Read more

Numerous studies have tested the effects of pedagogical agents on learning and the influence of their specific appearance. What has not been analyzed, however, is whether an agent can have indirect effects when it is employed as a tutor for learning strategies rather than directly teaching the relevant learning material. In a between-subjects design (N = 45) we compared two different kinds of pedagogical agents – a cartoon-like rabbit and a realistic anthropomorphic agent –... Read more

This paper aims to present e the work developed at Cnotinfor within the LIREC project. We will present Little Mozart mind architecture and facial expressions. Our goal is to create a virtual e-learning agent capable of establishing meaningful interactions with children on how to compose and improve their knowledge of melodic composition and basics of musical language. In order to make our agent believable and engaging we resorted to facial and body 3D modeling techniques... Read more

This paper describes the design and implementation of a virtual agent that is capable of providing customers in a 3D online shop with advice. Based on a product knowledge base, a conversation model and a model of the shop, the agent communicates with the customer through text based dialogues and leads the customer through the virtual world using gestures. Read more

In this paper we present an implementation of a embodied conversational agent that serves as a virtual tour guide in Second Life. We show how we combined the abilities of a conversational agent with navigation in the world and present some preliminary evaluation results. Read more