Rozprawy doktorskie: „Conversation Agent”

1

Ishii, Ryo. "Designing Conversational Interfaces for Facilitating Conversation using User's Gaze Behaviors". 京都大学 (Kyoto University), 2013. http://hdl.handle.net/2433/180472.

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au, os goh@murdoch edu, i Ong Sing Goh. "A framework and evaluation of conversation agents". Murdoch University, 2008. http://wwwlib.murdoch.edu.au/adt/browse/view/adt-MU20081020.134601.

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This project details the development of a novel and practical framework for the development of conversation agents (CAs), or conversation robots. CAs, are software programs which can be used to provide a natural interface between human and computers. In this study, conversation refers to real-time dialogue exchange between human and machine which may range from web chatting to on-the-go conversation through mobile devices. In essence, the project proposes a smart and effective communication technology where an autonomous agent is able to carry out simulated human conversation via multiple channels. The CA developed in this project is termed Artificial Intelligence Natural-language Identity (AINI) and AINI is used to illustrate the implementation and testing carried out in this project. Up to now, most CAs have been developed with a short term objective to serve as tools to convince users that they are talking with real humans as in the case of the Turing Test. The traditional designs have mainly relied on ad-hoc approach and hand-crafted domain knowledge. Such approaches make it difficult for a fully integrated system to be developed and modified for other domain applications and tasks. The proposed framework in this thesis addresses such limitations. Overcoming the weaknesses of previous systems have been the key challenges in this study. The research in this study has provided a better understanding of the system requirements and the development of a systematic approach for the construction of intelligent CAs based on agent architecture using a modular N-tiered approach. This study demonstrates an effective implementation and exploration of the new paradigm of Computer Mediated Conversation (CMC) through CAs. The most significant aspect of the proposed framework is its ability to re-use and encapsulate expertise such as domain knowledge, natural language query and human-computer interface through plug-in components. As a result, the developer does not need to change the framework implementation for different applications. This proposed system provides interoperability among heterogeneous systems and it has the flexibility to be adapted for other languages, interface designs and domain applications. A modular design of knowledge representation facilitates the creation of the CA knowledge bases. This enables easier integration of open-domain and domain-specific knowledge with the ability to provide answers for broader queries. In order to build the knowledge base for the CAs, this study has also proposed a mechanism to gather information from commonsense collaborative knowledge and online web documents. The proposed Automated Knowledge Extraction Agent (AKEA) has been used for the extraction of unstructured knowledge from the Web. On the other hand, it is also realised that it is important to establish the trustworthiness of the sources of information. This thesis introduces a Web Knowledge Trust Model (WKTM) to establish the trustworthiness of the sources. In order to assess the proposed framework, relevant tools and application modules have been developed and an evaluation of their effectiveness has been carried out to validate the performance and accuracy of the system. Both laboratory and public experiments with online users in real-time have been carried out. The results have shown that the proposed system is effective. In addition, it has been demonstrated that the CA could be implemented on the Web, mobile services and Instant Messaging (IM). In the real-time human-machine conversation experiment, it was shown that AINI is able to carry out conversations with human users by providing spontaneous interaction in an unconstrained setting. The study observed that AINI and humans share common properties in linguistic features and paralinguistic cues. These human-computer interactions have been analysed and contributed to the understanding of how the users interact with CAs. Such knowledge is also useful for the development of conversation systems utilising the commonalities found in these interactions. While AINI is found having difficulties in responding to some forms of paralinguistic cues, this could lead to research directions for further work to improve the CA performance in the future.

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3

Bowden, MaryZoe. "Teaching as a Moral Act: Simone Weil's Liminality as an Addition to the Moral Conversation in Education". Doctoral diss., University of Central Florida, 2009. http://digital.library.ucf.edu/cdm/ref/collection/ETD/id/3592.

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We are facing a crisis in education: there is a vacuum where there once was an exhortation in terms of how teachers serve as moral models for their students. This reality becomes even more complex when the particular educator facing the dilemma has a specific religious perspective herself. The problem confronted in this philosophical study is how does today's educator, working in the public sector and having a particular religious background, best serve her students in her role as a moral agent, given an environment that is either vacuous of or even hostile toward the moral vector implicit in education. The following questions are considered: 1) Does education today have a moral end? 2) What should that moral end be? 3) What should the educator's role be in said education? 4) Has education historically served as a moral endeavor? 5) And finally, how much should a teacher with a specific religious basis for her morals allow that to affect her role as moral agent in a secular setting? In order to respond to these questions, an historical review of how teachers were traditionally expected to serve as moral agents was undertaken, as were a review of contemporary research on moral education and a consideration of numerous philosophers' perspectives. Simone Weil, a French philosopher and teacher, is looked to as an example of a woman who lived her life with a core set of beliefs that led her to both push boundaries and yet remain in a liminal space that allowed her to remain open to others' values and needs. Weil's liminal approach to life is explored in combination with MacIntyre's call to found a morality on virtues based on a teleological view of man. Ultimately it is suggested that the educator with a deep sense of faith must both strive to function in the liminality Weil represented, and to root herself deeply in her own faith, from which she will gain the strength to live within the necessary tension evoked by teaching in a secular institution.
Ed.D.
Other
Education
Education EdD

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4

Jääskeläinen, Petra Pauliina. "Conversation Analysis as a Design Research Method for Designing Socioculturally Contextual Conversational Agents". Thesis, Uppsala universitet, Människa-datorinteraktion, 2020. http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:uu:diva-414120.

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This research paper presents a study exploring if using the Conversational Analysis (CA) method in design research could result in designing more socioculturally contextual conversational agents. The research specifically focused on understanding the 1) effect on the design outcome and 2) the role in the design process. This was studied through practice-based design research, participant evaluation of the design outcome, and expert interviews on the design method. The findings were analysed both qualitatively and quantitatively and showed, that socioculturally contextual design could potentially be a data-rich field of study with connections to design concepts such as inclusive design, affective design, design ethics, increased user experience, and further studies are therefore recommended. Furthermore, the study provided an understanding of the contexts in which the CA method may be useful in design, how it can potentially impact the design, and how to apply it to the design process and showed a positive effect on the design outcome in terms of socioculturally contextual design.

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VELMOVITSKY, PEDRO ELKIND. "IBOT: AN AGENT-BASED SOFTWARE FRAMEWORK FOR CREATING DOMAIN CONVERSATIONAL AGENTS". PONTIFÍCIA UNIVERSIDADE CATÓLICA DO RIO DE JANEIRO, 2018. http://www.maxwell.vrac.puc-rio.br/Busca_etds.php?strSecao=resultado&nrSeq=35430@1.

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PONTIFÍCIA UNIVERSIDADE CATÓLICA DO RIO DE JANEIRO
COORDENAÇÃO DE APERFEIÇOAMENTO DO PESSOAL DE ENSINO SUPERIOR
PROGRAMA DE EXCELENCIA ACADEMICA
Chatbots são programas de computador que interagem com usuários utilizando linguagem natural. Desde sua origem, a tecnologia avançou significantemente e aplicações baseadas na nuvem de grandes empresas permitiram que desenvolvedores criassem chatbots inteligentes e eficientes. No entanto, não há muitas abordagens de desenvolvimento aos principais módulos de um chatbot que são flexíveis o suficiente para permitir a criação de chatbots diferentes para cada domínio, mantendo um robusto controle de diálogo na aplicação. Existem trabalhos que tentam desenvolver uma abordagem mais flexível, cada um com suas vantagens e desvantagens. Uma das vantagens mais notáveis é o uso de sistemas multiagentes para distribuir e realizar tarefas feitas por chatbots. Nesse contexto, este trabalho propõe um framework geral e flexível baseado em sistemas multiagentes para construir chatbots em um domínio escolhido pelo desenvolvedor, com controle de diálogo na aplicação. Esta solução usa uma adaptação da abordagem de estado da informação, e agentes de software, para gestão do diálogo. Para validar a arquitetura proposta, um cenário de uso com 4 chatbots de prova de conceito são analisados e discutidos.
Chatbots are computer programs that interact with users using natural language. Since its inception, the technology has advanced greatly and cloud-based platforms from big companies allow developers to create intelligent and efficient chatbots. However, there are not many development approaches to the main modules of a chatbot that are flexible enough to allow the creation of different chatbots for each domain, while maintaining a robust dialogue control in the application. There have been some works that try to develop a more flexible approach, each of them with their own advantages and disadvantages. One of the most notable advantages is the use of multi-agent systems to distribute and perform the tasks performed by the chatbot. In this context, this work proposes a general and flexible architecture based on multi-agent systems for building chatbots in any domain chosen by the developer, with dialogue control in the application. This architecture uses an adaptation of the information state approach, also using software agents, to perform dialogue management. To validate the proposed architecture, an user scenario involving the implementation of 4 proof of concept chatbots is analyzed discussed.

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6

Lee, John Ray. "Conversations with an intelligent agent-- modeling and integrating patterns in communications among humans and agents". Diss., University of Iowa, 2006. http://ir.uiowa.edu/etd/61.

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Hijjawi, Moh'd Hatim Husni. "ArabChat : an Arabic conversational agent". Thesis, Manchester Metropolitan University, 2011. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.547403.

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This thesis details the development of a novel and practical Conversational Agent for the Arabic language called ArabChat. A conversational Agent is a computer program that attempts to simulate conversations between machine and human. In this thesis, the term 'conversation' or 'utterance' refers to real-time chat exchange between machine and human. The proposed framework for developing the Arabic Conversational Agent (ArabChat) is based on Pattern Matching approach to handle users' conversations. The Pattern Matching approach is based on the matching process between a user's utterance and pre-scripted patterns that represents different topics organised through novel scripting structure. ArabChat classifies users' utterances as either question or nonquestion utterances in order to response to an utterance depending on its type (question or non-question). In addition, ArabChat has the ability to reply to an utterance targets many topics at the same time. Moreover, this thesis proposes to use the stemming technique (a process to return a word to its original root) as a pre-processing stage in ArabChat in order to convert the processed utterance's words to stemmed words and then match them with stemmed pre-scripted patterns. This proposal might decrease the number of needed patterns to script a domain to the minimum as discussed in this thesis. Furthermore, two new Arabic stemmers have been proposed, developed and discussed in this thesis In order to assess ArabChat, different techniques have been developed and used to validate its performance. Three experiments with online users have been carried out. The results have shown that ArabChat is effective.

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8

Ly, Eric Thich Vi. "Chatter--a conversational telephone agent". Thesis, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1993. http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/29067.

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Rystedt, Beata, i Mia Zdybek. "Conversational agent as kitchen assistant". Thesis, KTH, Skolan för teknikvetenskap (SCI), 2018. http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:kth:diva-230904.

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Chatbots, also called conversational agents, with speech interfaces are being used to a greater and greater extent, but there are still many areas that are not completely explored. The idea of this project was born out of the belief that there is a need for an assistant in the kitchen that is able to search for recipes, answer questions regarding them and guide and assist the user throughout the cooking process, all through conversation since the hands are busy. This paper begins with an introduction in the subject of conversational agents and the related technology, then similar, already existing studies and methods are presented with their pros and cons. After follows an in-depth explanation on how the program was constructed into a working kitchen assistant. Lastly, the users’ experiences of the performance and usability of the program was evaluated through tests and discussed. It turns out that conversational agents definitely can be integrated in the kitchen, and according to several sources, in a few years they will be implemented in all possible areas and change the technology of our time.
Konversationsrobotar med talgränssnitt används i allt större och större utsträckning men det finns fortfarande många områden som inte är helt utforskade. Idén till det här arbetet föddes ur uppfattningen att det existerar ett behov av en hjälpreda till köket som kan söka recept, svara på frågor kring receptet och vägleda och hjälpa användaren genom hela matlagningsprocessen i muntligt form eftersom händerna är upptagna med annat. Det här arbetet börjar med en introduktion i ämnet kring konversationsrobotar och tekniken bakom, sedan presenteras liknande arbeten och metoder som redan existerar inom området. Sedan följer en djupdykning i hur det framtagna programmet i detta arbete utvecklats fram till en fungerande matlagningsassisten. Till slut presenteras och diskuteras upplevelsen och användbarheten av konversationsroboten hos människor baserat på tester som gjorts. Det visar sig att konversationsrobotar mycket väl kan vara av användning i köket, och enligt flera källor kommer de att inom en snar framtid lavinartat implementeras i alla möjliga områden och förändra tekniken i vårt samhälle.

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10

Chaabi, Youness. "Apport des Systèmes Multi-Agent et de la logique floue pour l'assistance au tuteur dans une communauté d'apprentissage en ligne". Thesis, Belfort-Montbéliard, 2016. http://www.theses.fr/2016BELF0293/document.

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La place importante du tutorat dans la réussite d'un dispositif de formation en ligne a ouvert un nouvel axe de recherche dans le domaine des EIAH (Environnements Informatiques pour l'Apprentissage Humain). Nos travaux se situent plus particulièrement dans le champ de recherches des ACAO. Dans un contexte collaboratif, le tutorat et les outils « d'awareness » constituent des solutions admises pour faire face à l'isolement qui très souvent, mène à l'abandon de l'apprenant. Ainsi, du fait des difficultés rencontrées par le tuteur pour assurer un encadrement et un suivi appropriés à partir des traces de communication (en quantités conséquentes) laissées par les apprenants, nous proposons une approche multi-agents pour analyser les conversations textuelles asynchrones entre apprenants. Ces interactions sont révélatrices de comportements sociaux-animateur, indépendant, etc... qu'il nous paraît important de pouvoir repérer lors d'une pédagogie de projet pour permettre aux apprenants de situer leurs travaux par rapport aux autres apprenants et situer leur groupe par rapport aux autres groupes d'une part, et d'autre part permettre au tuteur d'accompagner les apprenants dans leur processus d'apprentissage, repérer et soutenir les individus en difficulté pour leur éviter l'abandon. Ces indicateurs seront déduits à partir des grands volumes d'échanges textuels entre apprenants.L'approche a été ensuite testée sur une situation réelle, qui a montré une parfaite concordance entre les résultatsobservés par des tuteurs humains et ceux déterminés automatiquement par notre système
The growing importance of online training has put emphasis on the role of remote tutoring. A whole new area of research, dedicated to environment for human learning (EHL), is emerging. We are concerned with this field. More specifically, we will focus on the monitoring of learners.The instrumentation and observation of learners activities by exploiting interaction traces in the EHL and the development of indicators can help tutors to monitor activities of learners and support them in their collaborative learning process. Indeed, in a learning situation, the teacher needs to observe the behavior of learners in order to build an idea about their involvement, preferences and learning styles so that he can adapt the proposed activities. As part of the automatic analysis of collaborative learner¿s activities, we describe a multi agent approach for supporting learning activities in a Virtual Learning Environment context. In order to assist teachers who monitor learning processes, viewed as a specific type of collaboration, the proposed system estimates a behavioral (sociological) profile for each student. This estimation is based on automatic analysis of students textual asynchronous conversations. The determined profiles are proposed to the teacher and may provide assistance toteacher during tutoring tasks. The system was experimented with students of the master "software quality" of the Ibn Tofail University. The results obtained show that the proposed approach is effective and gives satisfactory results

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11

O'Shea, Karen Suzanne. "A semantic-based conversational agent framework". Thesis, University of Oxford, 2011. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.543751.

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Bachmann, Lea. "A provocation around the ethics in human-conversational agent relationships : A contribution to an ethically responsible future between humans and conversational agents". Thesis, Umeå universitet, Designhögskolan vid Umeå universitet, 2021. http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:umu:diva-183959.

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The usage of conversational agents in domestic spaces is increasing every year and with this ethical issues that we have not anticipated will arise, both because these relationships are human-like and not human-like.This thesis shows that ethically responsible relations- hips between humans and conversational agents in private contexts and domestic environments are much more than conversational design. This project is not primarily focussing on designing dialogues, words, and voices but takes a closer look at the qualities and values these relationships are based on. It is looking at how agents are staged, using design fiction as a methodlogy and medium to raise questions around the impacts of these relati- onships. Furthermore, it is also pointing out some of the possible unintended consequences that could occur if these agents are staged, like personaswith human-like features or if technology goes in between human-human relationships.After multiple design explorations and realizing how complex human-agent and human-human re-lationships are, I realized that the best way to make an impact was not to provide solutions on how ethically responsible relationships between humans and conversational agents should look like. Instead, I have created a set of fictional design ar- tifacts in different future contexts. They aim to point out what designers who design for these relations- hips need to tweak and pay attention to to create more ethically responsible futures.As I created these design fictions, I aimed to find a good balance between humor, provocation, and abstraction to leave room for people‘s imagination. In addition, I am hoping to provoke enough for my audience to feel triggered to raise even more re- levant questions and point out further opportunities for other designers to build on my work.Finally, a fictional design organization was created, which I called “A(i)activists“. I see this as a space where the design fiction can live on and a great medium to communicate the project vision and mis- sion and create a small place for ongoing debates and input from a diverse audience.

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13

Goh, Ong Sing. "A framework and evaluation of conversation agents". Goh, Ong Sing (2008) A framework and evaluation of conversation agents. PhD thesis, Murdoch University, 2008. http://researchrepository.murdoch.edu.au/752/.

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This project details the development of a novel and practical framework for the development of conversation agents (CAs), or conversation robots. CAs, are software programs which can be used to provide a natural interface between human and computers. In this study, ‘conversation’ refers to real-time dialogue exchange between human and machine which may range from web chatting to “on-the-go” conversation through mobile devices. In essence, the project proposes a “smart and effective” communication technology where an autonomous agent is able to carry out simulated human conversation via multiple channels. The CA developed in this project is termed “Artificial Intelligence Natural-language Identity” (AINI) and AINI is used to illustrate the implementation and testing carried out in this project. Up to now, most CAs have been developed with a short term objective to serve as tools to convince users that they are talking with real humans as in the case of the Turing Test. The traditional designs have mainly relied on ad-hoc approach and hand-crafted domain knowledge. Such approaches make it difficult for a fully integrated system to be developed and modified for other domain applications and tasks. The proposed framework in this thesis addresses such limitations. Overcoming the weaknesses of previous systems have been the key challenges in this study. The research in this study has provided a better understanding of the system requirements and the development of a systematic approach for the construction of intelligent CAs based on agent architecture using a modular N-tiered approach. This study demonstrates an effective implementation and exploration of the new paradigm of Computer Mediated Conversation (CMC) through CAs. The most significant aspect of the proposed framework is its ability to re-use and encapsulate expertise such as domain knowledge, natural language query and human-computer interface through plug-in components. As a result, the developer does not need to change the framework implementation for different applications. This proposed system provides interoperability among heterogeneous systems and it has the flexibility to be adapted for other languages, interface designs and domain applications. A modular design of knowledge representation facilitates the creation of the CA knowledge bases. This enables easier integration of open-domain and domain-specific knowledge with the ability to provide answers for broader queries. In order to build the knowledge base for the CAs, this study has also proposed a mechanism to gather information from commonsense collaborative knowledge and online web documents. The proposed Automated Knowledge Extraction Agent (AKEA) has been used for the extraction of unstructured knowledge from the Web. On the other hand, it is also realised that it is important to establish the trustworthiness of the sources of information. This thesis introduces a Web Knowledge Trust Model (WKTM) to establish the trustworthiness of the sources. In order to assess the proposed framework, relevant tools and application modules have been developed and an evaluation of their effectiveness has been carried out to validate the performance and accuracy of the system. Both laboratory and public experiments with online users in real-time have been carried out. The results have shown that the proposed system is effective. In addition, it has been demonstrated that the CA could be implemented on the Web, mobile services and Instant Messaging (IM). In the real-time human-machine conversation experiment, it was shown that AINI is able to carry out conversations with human users by providing spontaneous interaction in an unconstrained setting. The study observed that AINI and humans share common properties in linguistic features and paralinguistic cues. These human-computer interactions have been analysed and contributed to the understanding of how the users interact with CAs. Such knowledge is also useful for the development of conversation systems utilising the commonalities found in these interactions. While AINI is found having difficulties in responding to some forms of paralinguistic cues, this could lead to research directions for further work to improve the CA performance in the future.

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14

Venter, Wessel Johannes. "An embodied conversational agent with autistic behaviour". Thesis, Stellenbosch : Stellenbosch University, 2012. http://hdl.handle.net/10019.1/20115.

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Thesis (MSc)--Stellenbosch University, 2012.
ENGLISH ABSTRACT: In this thesis we describe the creation of an embodied conversational agent which exhibits the behavioural traits of a child who has Asperger Syndrome. The agent is rule-based, rather than arti cially intelligent, for which we give justi cation. We then describe the design and implementation of the agent, and pay particular attention to the interaction between emotion, personality and social context. A 3D demonstration program shows the typical output to conform to Asperger-like answers, with corresponding emotional responses.
AFRIKAANSE OPSOMMING: In hierdie tesis beskryf ons die ontwerp en implementasie van 'n gestaltegespreksagent wat die gedrag van 'n kind met Asperger se sindroom uitbeeld. Ons regverdig die besluit dat die agent reël-gebaseerd is, eerder as 'n ware skynintelligensie implementasie. Volgende beskryf ons die wisselwerking tussen emosies, persoonlikheid en sosiale konteks en hoe dit inskakel by die ontwerp en implementasie van die agent. 'n 3D demonstrasieprogram toon tipiese ooreenstemmende Asperger-agtige antwoorde op vrae, met gepaardgaande emosionele reaksies.

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15

Alobaidi, Omar. "Arabic conversational agent for modern Islamic education". Thesis, Manchester Metropolitan University, 2015. http://e-space.mmu.ac.uk/309/.

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This thesis presents research that combines the benefits of intelligent tutoring systems (ITS), Arabic conversational agents (CA) and learning theories by constructing a novel Arabic conversational intelligent tutoring system (CITS) called Abdullah. Abdullah CITS is a software program intended to deliver a tutorial to students aged between 10 and 12 years old, that covers the essential topics in Islam using natural language. The CITS aims to mimic a human Arabic tutor by engaging the students in dialogue using Modern standard Arabic language (MSA), whilst also allowing conversation and discussion in classical Arabic language (CAL). Developing a CITS for the Arabic language faces many challenges due to the complexity of the morphological system, non-standardization of the written text, ambiguity, and lack of resources. However, the main challenge for the developed Arabic CITS is how the user utterances are recognized and responded to by the CA, as well as how the domain is scripted and maintained. This research presents a novel Arabic CA and accompanying a scripting language that use a form of pattern matching, to handle users' conversations when the user converse in MSA. A short text similarity measure is used within Abdullah CITS to extract the responses from CAL resources such as the Quran, Hadith, and Tafsir if there are no matching patterns with the Arabic conversation agent's scripts. Abdullah CITS is able to capture the user's level of knowledge and adapt the tutoring session and tutoring style to suit that particular learner's level of knowledge. This is achieved through the inclusion of several learning theories and methods such as Gagne's learning theory, Piaget learning theory, and storytelling method. These learning theories and methods implemented within Abdullah's CITS architecture, are applied to personalise a tutorial to an individual learner. This research presents the first Arabic CITS, which utilises established learning typically employed in a classroom environment. The system was evaluated through end user testing with the target age group in schools both in Jordan and in the UK. Empirical experimentation has produced some positive results, indicating that Abdullah CITS is gauging the individual learner's knowledge level and adapting the tutoring session to ensure learning gain is achieved.

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Wang, Austin J. (Austin Jesse) 1980. "Collaborative storytelling with an embodied conversational agent". Thesis, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2003. http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/16976.

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Thesis (M.Eng.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, 2003.
Leaves not numbered.
Includes bibliographical references (leaves [60]-[64]).
This electronic version was submitted by the student author. The certified thesis is available in the Institute Archives and Special Collections.
When children tell stories to their peers, they naturally collaborate with each other: coauthoring stories, corroborating when in doubt, and acting as active listeners. Their reliance on each other during, as well as the creative process itself, benefits their literacy development. If an interactive system were to engage a child in collaborative narrative, it would be able to exert greater influence over the child's language processes, without becoming overly intrusive as to obstruct his/her natural behaviors. However, due to the spontaneous nature of improvisational play, the problem becomes a challenging one from both a technical, and a behavioral standpoint. This thesis studies children's collaborative behaviors during storytelling and presents a model of the participants' roles, and how to initiate and participate in collaboration with appropriate speech acts and turn-taking cues. Furthermore, it demonstrates how technologies such as speech recognition, natural language processing with commonsense reasoning, multimodal interfaces, and floor management are critical to realizing a real-time collaborative interaction between children and an embodied conversational agent.
bu Austin J. Wang.
M.Eng.

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17

Hunt, Janey. "Conversations : the socially engaged artist as environmental change agent". Thesis, University of Plymouth, 2011. http://hdl.handle.net/10026.1/817.

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I use my art practice in conjunction with environmental behaviour research and Michel de Certeau’s practice of the everyday, to enable a re-examination of socially engaged art and through art to activate environmental behaviour change. Questions Clarify contemporary debate about demonstrable and desirable aspects and issues of socially engaged art practice and through my own practice identify its key characteristics. Examine the claim for change offered by many socially engaged practitioners. Context The socially engaged artist operates outside of the gallery, in everyday lives and real situations, often engaging in issues of meaning to society at large, where participation and facilitation of dialogue are the common characteristics. I identify participation, the ambition of social change, aesthetic representation and a failure to communicate beyond the participative event as key considerations. (Bishop 2004; Bourriaud 2002; Kester 2004; Kwon 2004) I propose an aesthetic of presence, to recognise community as a creative vernacular and as pooled knowledge. Drawn from Michel de Certeau’s research into everyday life (Michel de Certeau 1985; Michel de Certeau et al. 1998a) this also provides a refocusing on participation through conversation and describes rupture events, which signify change occurring. Method This thesis compares research in an alternative field, environmental behaviour, which investigates the impediments to change (the value-action gap), how change happens and identifies the change agent, as essential to encourage change at a personal level. (Ballard and Associates 2005b; Darnton et al. 2006) I use the value-action gap, the tension point between knowing about climate change and failing to make changes in our own behaviour, (Blake 1999; Darnton 2004b; Kollmus and Agyeman 2002) as a direct impetus to make participative artwork that examines the idea of a sustainable lifestyle. My art practice recognises a three-stage process: an admission of my own environmental behaviour; encouraging reciprocal participation and conversation and enabling personal reflection; representing conversation offering shared vernacular knowledge and enabling others’ engagement with the artwork and behaviour change. Equating the socially engaged artist with the environmental change agent, I synthesised the Model for Change Agents (S. Ballard and Ballard 2005a; Ballard and Associates 2005b) with research on participation in the arts (Matarasso 1997), as a basis for understanding how participation occurs and how change could happen in socially engaged artworks. An analysis of pilot artworks extends this model to identify the conditions for change, which also equate to the aesthetic aspects of the artwork, in a new model for Practice, Participation and Progression. Outcomes I propose key characteristics for socially engaged practice based on analysis of contemporary commentators and the model for practice, participation and progression. The role of the socially engaged artist is identified as comparable to the change agent. Representing conversation, addresses an issue of socially engaged practice to communicate beyond documentation of the event’s provocation and participation. I develop discussion of the discursive site beyond participation itself to a community of common sensibility and pooled knowledge as a demonstration of personal agency that is able to redefine the public ideal and challenge dominant culture. Re-presenting conversation is a means of sharing knowledge, stimulating change and expanding community. Contributing to environmental behaviour research my art practice reveals our ability to abstract behaviour, identifies our main areas of concern within lifestyle, our motivations for making change and the importance of the preservation of personal agency. I also comment on de Certeau, identifying the problems with individual resistance through the everyday, exploring mini-rupture events signaling change and proposing a reversal of the aesthetic of absence to an aesthetic of presence creating a new narrative that utilises personal agency.

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18

Xiao, He. "An affective personality for an embodied conversational agent". Curtin University of Technology, Department of Computer Engineering, 2006. http://espace.library.curtin.edu.au:80/R/?func=dbin-jump-full&object_id=16139.

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Curtin Universitys Embodied Conversational Agents (ECA) combine an MPEG-4 compliant Facial Animation Engine (FAE), a Text To Emotional Speech Synthesiser (TTES), and a multi-modal Dialogue Manager (DM), that accesses a Knowledge Base (KB) and outputs Virtual Human Markup Language (VHML) text which drives the TTES and FAE. A user enters a question and an animated ECA responds with a believable and affective voice and actions. However, this response to the user is normally marked up in VHML by the KB developer to produce the required facial gestures and emotional display. A real person does not react by fixed rules but on personality, beliefs, previous experiences, and training. This thesis details the design, implementation and pilot study evaluation of an Affective Personality Model for an ECA. The thesis discusses the Email Agent system that informs a user when they have email. The system, built in Curtins ECA environment, has personality traits of Friendliness, Extraversion and Neuroticism. A small group of participants evaluated the Email Agent system to determine the effectiveness of the implemented personality system. An analysis of the qualitative and quantitative results from questionnaires is presented.

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Xiao, He. "An affective personality for an embodied conversational agent /". Full text available, 2007. http://adt.curtin.edu.au/theses/available/adt-WCU20080417.145203.

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20

Guichard, Jonathan. "Quality Assessment of Conversational Agents : Assessing the Robustness of Conversational Agents to Errors and Lexical Variability". Thesis, KTH, Skolan för elektroteknik och datavetenskap (EECS), 2018. http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:kth:diva-226552.

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Assessing a conversational agent’s understanding capabilities is critical, as poor user interactions could seal the agent’s fate at the very beginning of its lifecycle with users abandoning the system. In this thesis we explore the use of paraphrases as a testing tool for conversational agents. Paraphrases, which are different ways of expressing the same intent, are generated based on known working input by performing lexical substitutions and by introducing multiple spelling divergences. As the expected outcome for this newly generated data is known, we can use it to assess the agent’s robustness to language variation and detect potential understanding weaknesses. As demonstrated by a case study, we obtain encouraging results as it appears that this approach can help anticipate potential understanding shortcomings, and that these shortcomings can be addressed by the generated paraphrases.
Att bedöma en konversationsagents språkförståelse är kritiskt, eftersom dåliga användarinteraktioner kan avgöra om agenten blir en framgång eller ett misslyckande redan i början av livscykeln. I denna rapport undersöker vi användningen av parafraser som ett testverktyg för dessa konversationsagenter. Parafraser, vilka är olika sätt att uttrycka samma avsikt, skapas baserat på känd indata genom att utföra lexiska substitutioner och genom att introducera flera stavningsavvikelser. Eftersom det förväntade resultatet för denna indata är känd kan vi använda resultaten för att bedöma agentens robusthet mot språkvariation och upptäcka potentiella förståelssvagheter. Som framgår av en fallstudie får vi uppmuntrande resultat, eftersom detta tillvägagångssätt verkar kunna bidra till att förutse eventuella brister i förståelsen, och dessa brister kan hanteras av de genererade parafraserna.

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21

Xiao, Jun. "Empirical Studies on Embodied Conversational Agents". Diss., Georgia Institute of Technology, 2006. http://hdl.handle.net/1853/14080.

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A great deal of effort has been put into developing Embodied Conversational Agent (ECA) systems that provide a human-like assistant in the user interface. However, little is known whether improvements to ECA interfaces made by such efforts can ever be significant from the users point of view. I studied user experiences with ECA interfaces and evaluated the ECA style of interaction with respect to user expectation, perception, behavior and performance. I introduce a conceptual framework that offers a holistic view of the design space of ECA systems. I also have created a middleware toolkit that facilitates rapid development of application content across different speech and animation platforms. A series of user studies has been carried out to investigate the similarities and differences between human-computer interaction and human-ECA interaction and between human-ECA interaction and human-human interaction. Results from these studies provide strong evidence that people are consciously aware of the capabilities and limitations of ECAs. Traditional GUI design heuristics should be carefully followed when designing ECA interfaces. Furthermore, the results soundly suggest that designers of ECA interfaces take extra care to accommodate individual differences and preferences. Social norms that guide human-human interaction greatly affect individuals expectation and perception of ECA characteristics. The findings support the argument that drawing from both human-computer interaction and human-human interaction can be significantly advantageous to the design of both effective and affective human-ECA interaction.

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22

Smith, Cameron G. "Cognitive aspects of embodied conversational agents". Thesis, Teesside University, 2013. http://hdl.handle.net/10149/301618.

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Embodied Conversational Agents (ECA) seek to provide a more natural means of interaction for a user through conversation. ECA build on the dialogue abilities of spoken dialogue systems with the provision of a physical or virtual avatar. The rationale for this Thesis is that an ECA should be able to support a form of conversation capable of understanding both the content and affect of the dialogue and providing a meaningful response. The aim is to examine the cognitive aspects of ECA attempting such conversational dialogue in order to augment the abilities of dialogue management. The focus is on the provision of cognitive functions, outside of dialogue control, for managing the relationship with the user including the user’s emotional state. This will include a definition of conversation and an examination of the cognitive mechanisms that underpin meaningful conversation. The scope of this Thesis considers the development of a Companion ECA, the ‘How Was Your Day’ (HWYD) Companion, which enters into an open conversation with the user about the events of their day at work. The HWYD Companion attempts to positively influence the user’s attitude to these events. The main focus of this Thesis is on the Affective Strategy Module (ASM) which will attend to the information covering these events and the user’s emotional state in order to generate a plan for a narrative response. Within this narrative response the ASM will embed a means of influence acting upon the user’s attitude to the events. The HYWD Companion has contributed to the work on ECA through the provision of a system engaging in conversational dialogue including the affective aspects of such dialogue. This supports open conversation with longer utterances than typical task-oriented dialogue systems and can handle user interruptions. The main work of this Thesis provides a major component of this overall contribution and, in addition, provides a specific contribution of its own with the provision of narrative persuasion.

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Chang, Joey 1975. "Action scheduling in humanoid conversational agents". Thesis, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1998. http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/31079.

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Thesis (S.B. and M.Eng.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, 1998.
Includes bibliographical references (leaf 40).
This paper presents an approach to action scheduling in lifelike humanoid agents. The action scheduler constitutes a module in the agent which links the mental processes to the physical actions of the agent. It receives requests from the agent's behavior generating modules and schedules them to be executed at the appropriate time, handling such tasks as speech-to-action synchronization, concurrent and overlapping behavior blending, and behavior conflict resolution. The optimal approach to action scheduling will vary from system to system, depending upon the characteristics of the system, since the ultimate action scheduler would accommodate a fully functional human representation-a goal which is out of the scope of research today. This paper presents an action scheduler for a real-time three-dimensional multi-modal humanoid agent.
by Joey Chang.
S.B.and M.Eng.

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24

Kumar, Sanjeev. "A formal semantics of teamwork and multi-agent conversations as the basis of a language for programming teams of autonomous agents /". Full text open access at:, 2006. http://content.ohsu.edu/u?/etd,17.

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Nakano, Yukiko I. 1963. "Non-verbal signals for grounding in embodied conversational agent". Thesis, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2002. http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/62369.

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Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, School of Architecture and Planning, Program in Media Arts and Sciences, 2002.
Includes bibliographical references (leaves 79-82).
In face-to-face conversation, speakers present non-verbal signals collateral with verbal information. Nodding and gazing at a speaker are known to provide positive feedback from listeners, which contributes to establishing common ground (a process called grounding). However, previous theories and computational models of grounding were mainly concerned with verbal grounding acts, and there have not been enough discussion about how nonverbal behaviors are used in the process of grounding. This thesis first compares face-to-face conversation to conversation without co-presence, revealing how nonverbal behaviors are used in the process of grounding in human communication. Results of the analysis show that, in face-to-face communication, non-verbal behaviors are changing during an utterance and a typical transition pattern of non-verbal behaviors is also different depending on the type of verbal act. Then, the implementation of grounding functionality onto an Embodied Conversational Agent is presented. The dialogue state updating mechanism in the Dialogue Manager accesses non-verbal information conveyed by a user and judges the groundedness of presented materials based on the results of empirical study.
by Yukiko I. Nakano.
S.M.

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26

Panesar, Kulvinder. "Functional linguistic based motivations for a conversational software agent". Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2019. http://hdl.handle.net/10454/18134.

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No
This chapter discusses a linguistically orientated model of a conversational software agent (CSA) (Panesar 2017) framework sensitive to natural language processing (NLP) concepts and the levels of adequacy of a functional linguistic theory (LT). We discuss the relationship between NLP and knowledge representation (KR), and connect this with the goals of a linguistic theory (Van Valin and LaPolla 1997), in particular Role and Reference Grammar (RRG) (Van Valin Jr 2005). We debate the advantages of RRG and consider its fitness and computational adequacy. We present a design of a computational model of the linking algorithm that utilises a speech act construction as a grammatical object (Nolan 2014a, Nolan 2014b) and the sub-model of belief, desire and intentions (BDI) (Rao and Georgeff 1995). This model has been successfully implemented in software, using the resource description framework (RDF), and we highlight some implementation issues that arose at the interface between language and knowledge representation (Panesar 2017).
The full-text of this article will be released for public view at the end of the publisher embargo on 27 Sep 2024.

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27

Elvir, Miguel. "EPISODIC MEMORY MODEL FOR EMBODIED CONVERSATIONAL AGENTS". Master's thesis, University of Central Florida, 2010. http://digital.library.ucf.edu/cdm/ref/collection/ETD/id/3000.

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Embodied Conversational Agents (ECA) form part of a range of virtual characters whose intended purpose include engaging in natural conversations with human users. While works in literature are ripe with descriptions of attempts at producing viable ECA architectures, few authors have addressed the role of episodic memory models in conversational agents. This form of memory, which provides a sense of autobiographic record-keeping in humans, has only recently been peripherally integrated into dialog management tools for ECAs. In our work, we propose to take a closer look at the shared characteristics of episodic memory models in recent examples from the field. Additionally, we propose several enhancements to these existing models through a unified episodic memory model for ECAÂ s. As part of our research into episodic memory models, we present a process for determining the prevalent contexts in the conversations obtained from the aforementioned interactions. The process presented demonstrates the use of statistical and machine learning services, as well as Natural Language Processing techniques to extract relevant snippets from conversations. Finally, mechanisms to store, retrieve, and recall episodes from previous conversations are discussed. A primary contribution of this research is in the context of contemporary memory models for conversational agents and cognitive architectures. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first attempt at providing a comparative summary of existing works. As implementations of ECAs become more complex and encompass more realistic conversation engines, we expect that episodic memory models will continue to evolve and further enhance the naturalness of conversations.
M.S.Cp.E.
School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
Engineering and Computer Science
Computer Engineering MSCpE

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28

Nooraei, Beidokht Bahador. "A Real-Time Architecture for Conversational Agents". Digital WPI, 2012. https://digitalcommons.wpi.edu/etd-theses/972.

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"Consider two people having a face-to-face conversation. They sometimes listen, sometimes talk, and sometimes interrupt each other. They use facial expressions to signal that they are confused. They point at objects. They jump from topic to topic opportunistically. When another acquaintance walks by, they nod and say hello. All the while they have other concerns on their mind, such as not missing the meeting that starts in 10 minutes. Like many other humans behaviors, these are not easy to replicate in artificial agents. In this work we look into the design requirements of an embodied agent that can participate in such natural conversations in a mixed-initiative, multi-modal setting. Such an agent needs to understand participating in a conversation is not merely a matter of sending a message and then waiting to receive a response -- both partners are simultaneously active at all times. This agent should be able to deal with different, sometimes conflicting goals, and be always ready to address events that may interrupt the current topic of conversation. To address those requirements, we have created a modular architecture that includes distributed functional units that compete with each other to gain control over available resources. Each of these units, called a schema, has its own sense- think-act cycle. In the field of robotics, this design is often referred to as "behavior-based" or "schema-based." The major contribution of this work is merging behavior-based robotics with plan- based human-computer interaction."

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29

Moyo, Sharon G. "Effective tutoring with empathic embodied conversational agents". Thesis, Open University, 2014. http://oro.open.ac.uk/40803/.

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This thesis examines the prospect of using empathy in an Embodied Tutoring System (ETS) that guides students through an online quiz (by providing feedback on student answers and responding to self-reported student emotion). The ETS seeks to imitate human behaviours successfully used in one-to-one human tutorial interactions. The main hypothesis is that the interaction with an empathic ETS results in greater learning gains than a neutral ETS, primarily by encouraging positive and reducing negative student emotions using empathic feedback. In a preparatory study we investigated different strategies for expressing emotion by the ETS. We established that a multimodal strategy achieves the best results regarding how accurately human participants can recognise the emotions. This approach was used in developing the feedback strategy for our empathic ETS. The preparatory study was followed by two studies in which we compared a neutral with an empathic ETS. The ETS in the second of these studies was developed using results from the first of these studies. In both studies, we found no statistically significant difference in learning gains between the neutral and empathic ETS. However, we did discover a number of interactions between the ETS system, learning gains and, in particular 1) student scores on an empathic tendency test and 2) student ability. We also analysed the subjective responses and the relation between self-reported emotions during the quiz and student learning gains. Based on our studies in a formal class room setting, we assess the prospects of using empathic agents in a classroom setting and describe a number of requirements for their effective use.

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Osathanunkul, Khukrit. "Semantic similarity framework for Thai conversational agents". Thesis, Manchester Metropolitan University, 2014. http://e-space.mmu.ac.uk/336070/.

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Conversational Agents integrate computational linguistics techniques and natural language to support human-like communication with complex computer systems. There are a number of applications in business, education and entertainment, including unmanned call centres, or as personal shopping or navigation assistants. Initial research has been performed on Conversational Agents in languages other than English. There has been no significant publication on Thai Conversational Agents. Moreover, no research has been conducted on supporting algorithms for Thai word similarity measures and Thai sentence similarity measures. Consequently, this thesis details the development of a novel Thai sentence semantic similarity measure that can be used to create a Thai Conversational Agent. This measure, Thai Sentence Semantic Similarity measure (TSTS) is inspired by the seminal English measure, Sentence Similarity based on Semantic Nets and Corpus Statistics (STASIS). A Thai sentence benchmark dataset, called 65 Thai Sentence pairs benchmark dataset (TSS-65), is also presented in this thesis for the evaluation of TSTS. The research starts with the development a simple Thai word similarity measure called TWSS. Additionally, a novel word measure called a Semantic Similarity Measure, based on a Lexical Chain Created from a Search Engine (LCSS), is also proposed using a search engine to create the knowledge base instead of WordNet. LCSS overcomes the problem that a prototype version of Thai Word semantic similarity measure (TWSS) has with the word pairs that are related to Thai culture. Thai word benchmark datasets are also presented for the evaluation of TWSS and LCSS called the 30 Thai Word Pair benchmark dataset (TWS-30) and 65 Thai Word Pair benchmark dataset (TWS-65), respectively. The result of TSTS is considered a starting point for a Thai sentence measure which can be illustrated to create semantic-based Conversational Agents in future. This is illustrated using a small sample of real English Conversational Agent human dialogue utterances translated into Thai.

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31

Okamoto, Masayuki. "Design and applications of learning conversational agents". 京都大学 (Kyoto University), 2003. http://hdl.handle.net/2433/148780.

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Canducci, Marco. "End-to-End Goal-Oriented Conversational Agent for Risk Awareness". Master's thesis, Alma Mater Studiorum - Università di Bologna, 2020. http://amslaurea.unibo.it/20381/.

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Traditional development of goal-oriented conversational agents typically require a lot of domain-specific handcrafting, which precludes scaling up to different domains; end-to-end systems would escape this limitation because they can be trained directly from dialogues. The very promising success recently obtained in end-to-end chatbots development could carry over to goal-oriented settings: applying deep learning models for building robust and scalable goal-oriented dialog systems directly from corpora of conversations is a challenging task and an open research area. For this reason, I decided that it would have been more relevant in the context of a master's thesis to experiment and get acquainted with these new promising methodologies - although not yet ready for production - rather than investing time in hand-crafting dialogue rules for a domain-specific solution. My thesis work had the following macro objectives: (i) investigate the latest research works concerning goal-oriented conversational agents development; (ii) choose a reference study, understand it and implement it with an appropriate technology; (iii) apply what learnt to a particular domain of interest. As a reference framework I chose the end-to-end memory networks (MemN2N) (Sukhbaatar et al., 2015) because it has proven to be particularly promising and has been used as a baseline for many recent works. Not having real dialogues available for training though, I took care of synthetically generating a corpora of conversations, taking a cue from the Dialog bAbI dataset for restaurant reservations (Bordes et al., 2016) and adapting it to the new domain of interest of risk awareness. Finally, I built a simple prototype which exploited the pre-trained dialog model in order to advise users about risk through an anthropomorphic talking avatar interface.

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Panesar, Kulvinder. "An Evaluation of a Linguistically Motivated Conversational Software Agent Framework". UNIVERSITAT POLITÈCNICA DE VALÈNCIA, 2019. http://hdl.handle.net/10454/18122.

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yes
This paper presents a critical evaluation framework for a linguistically motivated conversational software agent (CSA). The CSA prototype investigates the integration, intersection and interface of the language, knowledge, and speech act constructions (SAC) based on a grammatical object, and the sub-model of belief, desires and intention (BDI) and dialogue management (DM) for natural language processing (NLP). A long-standing issue within NLP CSA systems is refining the accuracy of interpretation to provide realistic dialogue to support human-to-computer communication. This prototype constitutes three phase models: (1) a linguistic model based on a functional linguistic theory – Role and Reference Grammar (RRG), (2) an Agent Cognitive Model with two inner models: (a) a knowledge representation model, (b) a planning model underpinned by BDI concepts, intentionality and rational interaction, and (3) a dialogue model. The evaluation strategy for this Java-based prototype is multi-approach driven by grammatical testing (English language utterances), software engineering and agent practice. A set of evaluation criteria are grouped per phase model, and the testing framework aims to test the interface, intersection and integration of all phase models. The empirical evaluations demonstrate that the CSA is a proof-of-concept, demonstrating RRG’s fitness for purpose for describing, and explaining phenomena, language processing and knowledge, and computational adequacy. Contrastingly, evaluations identify the complexity of lower level computational mappings of NL – agent to ontology with semantic gaps, and further addressed by a lexical bridging solution.

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34

Panesar, Kulvinder. "Motivating a linguistically orientated model for a conversational software agent". FungramKB.com, 2018. http://hdl.handle.net/10454/18135.

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Yes
This paper presents a critical evaluation framework for a linguistically orientated conversational software agent (CSA) (Panesar, 2017). The CSA prototype investigates the integration, intersection and interface of the language, knowledge, and speech act constructions (SAC) based on a grammatical object (Nolan, 2014), and the sub-‐model of belief, desires and intention (BDI) (Rao and Georgeff, 1995) and dialogue management (DM) for natural language processing (NLP). A long-‐standing issue within NLP CSA systems is refining the accuracy of interpretation to provide realistic dialogue to support the human-‐to-‐computer communication. This prototype constitutes three phase models: (1) a linguistic model based on a functional linguistic theory – Role and Reference Grammar (RRG) (Van Valin Jr, 2005); (2) Agent Cognitive Model with two inner models: (a) knowledge representation model employing conceptual graphs serialised to Resource Description Framework (RDF); (b) a planning model underpinned by BDI concepts (Wooldridge, 2013) and intentionality (Searle, 1983) and rational interaction (Cohen and Levesque, 1990); and (3) a dialogue model employing common ground (Stalnaker, 2002). The evaluation approach for this Java-‐based prototype and its phase models is a multi-‐approach driven by grammatical testing (English language utterances), software engineering and agent practice. A set of evaluation criteria are grouped per phase model, and the testing framework aims to test the interface, intersection and integration of all phase models and their inner models. This multi-‐approach encompasses checking performance both at internal processing, stages per model and post-‐implementation assessments of the goals of RRG, and RRG based specifics tests. The empirical evaluations demonstrate that the CSA is a proof-‐of-‐concept, demonstrating RRG’s fitness for purpose for describing, and explaining phenomena, language processing and knowledge, and computational adequacy. Contrastingly, evaluations identify the complexity of lower level computational mappings of NL – agent to ontology with semantic gaps, and further addressed by a lexical bridging consideration (Panesar, 2017).

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35

Leonhardt, Michelle Denise. "Enhancing affective communication in embodied conversational agents through personality-based hidden conversational goals". reponame:Biblioteca Digital de Teses e Dissertações da UFRGS, 2012. http://hdl.handle.net/10183/49756.

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Embodied Conversational Agents (ECAs) are intelligent software entities with an embodiment used to communicate with users, using natural language. Their purpose is to exhibit the same properties as humans in face-to-face conversation, including the ability to produce and respond to verbal and nonverbal communication. Researchers in the field of ECAs try to create agents that can be more natural, believable and easy to use. Designing an ECA requires understanding that manner, personality, emotion, and appearance are very important issues to be considered. In this thesis, we are interested in increasing believability of ECAs by placing personality at the heart of the human-agent verbal interaction. We propose a model relating personality facets and hidden communication goals that can influence ECA behaviors. Moreover, we apply our model in agents that interact in a puzzle game application. We develop five distinct personality oriented agents using an expressive communication language and a plan-based BDI approach for modeling and managing dialogue according to our proposed model. In summary, we present and test an innovative approach to model mental aspects of ECAs trying to increase their believability and to enhance human-agent affective communication. With this research, we hope to improve the understanding on how ECAs with expressive and affective characteristics can establish and maintain long-term human-agent relationships.

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36

Berger, Alexandra. "La communication entre agents de communautés mixtes : un langage de conversation expressif pour agents artificiels". Grenoble INPG, 2006. http://www.theses.fr/2006INPG0167.

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Ces travaux de thèse interdisciplinaires en Philosophie analytique et Sciences Cognitives présentent un Langage de Conversation Expressif pour agents artificiels de communautés mixtes, dans lesquelles cohabitent agents humains et artificiels. La problématique principale réside dans la difficulté de construire des systèmes centrés utilisateur, dans lesquels les différents agents (humains et artificiels) devront pouvoir interagir ensemble. Les langages de communication entre agents actuels (ACLs) ont été construits pour des agents artificiels, essentiellement dans un but d'échange de connaissances et d'interopérabilité. Un Langage de Conversation Expressif est ainsi proposé pour donner la possibilité aux agents de construire des dialogues « expressifs» (principalement des dialogues délibératifs). La thèse propose un catalogue de trente-deux actes définis formellement: des actes de conversation essentiels comme informer et demander (présents dans les ACLs classiques), mais également des actes comme promettre, suggérer ou encore affirmer, etc. , qui donnent des capacités langagières avancées aux agents artificiels
This manuscript presents an Expressive Conversation Language for artificial agents ofmixed community, where humans and artificial agents are evolving. Agent Communication Languages (ACL) typically assume that MultiAgent Systems are composed of artificial agents and that knowledge exchange is the main activity. This PhD Thesis considers Multi-Agent Systems extended to humans, where conversations rather than interactions are important to ensure dialogues such as negotiation. Therefore, we propose an Expressive Conversation Language for conversational agents of mixed communities. Thirty-two expressive conversation acts are formally defined, such as the basic acts Inform and Request, but also promise, suggest, insist on etc. , which give a primitive but interesting expressiveness to agents. This also opens the way of expressive discourse to Embodied Conversational Agents which constitute a new generation of multi-modal interfaces. This work was completed in Philosophy and Cognitive Science in the context of an international (France - Canada) co-directed PhD Thesis

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Berger, Alexandra. "La communication entre agents de communautés mixtes : un langage de conversation expressif pour agents artificiels /". Trois-Rivières : Université du Québec à Trois-Rivières, 2007. http://www.uqtr.ca/biblio/notice/resume/30001250R.pdf.

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Thèse (Ph.D.) - Université du Québec à Trois-Rivières, 2007.
En-tête de titre: Thèse de doctorat en cotutelle présentée à l'Université du Québec à Trois-Rivières et l'Institut national polytechnique de Grenoble comme exigence partielle du doctorat en Philosophie (UQTR) et du doctorat en Sciences cognitives (INPG). Comprend des réf. bibliogr. : f. 171-177. Également disponible en formats microfiche et PDF. CaQTU

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Berger, Alexandra. "La communication entre agents de communautés mixtes : un langage de conversation expressif pour agents artificiels". Thèse, Université du Québec à Trois-Rivières, 2007. http://depot-e.uqtr.ca/1550/1/030001250.pdf.

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Horned, Arvid. "Conversational agents in a family context : A qualitative study with children and parents investigating their interactions and worries regarding conversational agents". Thesis, Umeå universitet, Institutionen för informatik, 2020. http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:umu:diva-172348.

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Conversational agents such as Siri, Google and Alexa are growing in popularity, and Artificial Intelligence in the form of natural language processing utilized by these agents is becoming more available and capable with time. Understanding how conversational agents are used today and what implications it has for our daily lives is important if this trend is going to continue. In this thesis I present how children interact with conversational agents today and the implications this has for families. Four families with children in the age of 6-9 were interviewed regarding how children interact with conversational agents today, what concerns parents have and how they view the agent. The results show that children regard the conversational agent as a tool, and that the primary interactions are entertainment and exploration. Parents were concerned what the agent might say when they are not there, and do not feel in control of the agent. In the beginning children have high expectations on the capabilities of the agent but quickly assess the capabilities through experimentation.

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Mancini, Maurizio. "Multimodal distinctive behavior for expressive embodied conversational agents". Paris 8, 2008. https://octaviana.fr/items/show/9956#?c=0&m=0&s=0&cv=0.

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Les agents conversationnels sont un nouveau type d'interface de communication qui ont un aspect humain et des capacités communicatives. Les utilisateurs, qui interagissent avec ces agents, pourraient être plus engagés et participatifs si les agents montrent un comportement cohérent dans différentes situations conversationnelles et suivant leurs états émotionnels. En particulier les agents doivent maintenir une tendance générale comportementale au cours de toute conversation. Notre but est d'augmenter la crédibilité des agents en adressant deux aspects de la communication de l'agent: - un agent doit être capable de montrer ses intentions communicatives non seulement avec son choix des expressions faciales, gestes, etc. , mais aussi en modifiant la qualité de ses mouvements (e. G. , leur vitesse, amplitude, etc. ) et le choix des modalités qui sont utilisées durant la communication; - le comportement caractéristique de l'agent (i. E. Sa "tendance" du choix des modalités et sa qualité globale d'expressivité) doit transparaître durant toute communication. Nous avons développer un modèle qui intègre ces deux propriétés. Nous évaluons la capacité de l'agent à maintenir une tendance comportementale globale à travers des tests perceptifs et des scénarios applicatifs. Le système résultant est fortement extensible et configurable. Il peut être aussi utilisé comme instrument de recherche sur la communication humaine
Embodied Conversational Agents are a new type of computer interfaces which have human-like bodies and conversational skills. Users interacting with agents will be more engaged and participative if the agents exhibit behaviors which look coherent across different situations and emotional states. In the present work, we aim at increasing agents believability by looking at two main aspects of the problem : - an agent must be able to show its emotional state and communicative intentions not only through specific facial expressions, gestures, etc. , but also by varying the quality of its movements (e. G. , their speed, amplitude, etc. ) and the choice of the modalities that are used to communicate ; - the agent must maintain a disctinctive behavior tendency has to remain apparent during any communication ; We have developed a model to solve the two above issues. We have evaluated the realism and believability of the resulting agent's behaviors through perceptual tests and application scenario. The resulting system is highly extensible and configurable. It can also be used as a research tool to study human communication

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Chuu, Chian 1980. "LIESHOU : a Mandarin conversational task agent for the Galaxy-II Architecture". Thesis, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2003. http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/87397.

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Kaleem, Mohammed. "Methodology and algorithms for Urdu language processing in a conversational agent". Thesis, Manchester Metropolitan University, 2015. http://e-space.mmu.ac.uk/344/.

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This thesis presents the research and development of a novel text based goal-orientated conversational agent (CA) for the Urdu language called UMAIR (Urdu Machine for Artificially Intelligent Recourse). A CA is a computer program that emulates a human in order to facilitate a conversation with the user. The aim is investigate the Urdu language and its lexical and grammatical features in order to, design a novel engine to handle the language unique features of Urdu. The weakness in current Conversational Agent (CA) engines is that they are not suited to be implemented in other languages which have grammar rules and structure totally different to English. From a historical perspective CA’s including the design of scripting engines, scripting methodologies, resources and implementation procedures have been implemented for the most part in English and other Western languages (i.e. German and Spanish). The development of an Urdu conversational agent has required the research and development of new CA framework which incorporates methodologies and components in order overcome the language unique features of Urdu such as free word order, inconsistent use of space, diacritical marks and spelling. The new CA framework was utilised to implement UMAIR. UMAIR is a customer service agent for National Database and Registration Authority (NADRA) designed to answer user queries related to ID card and Passport applications. UMAIR is able to answer user queries related to the domain through discourse with the user by leading the conversation using questions and offering appropriate advice with the intention of leading the discourse to a pre-determined goal. The research and development of UMAIR led to the creation of several novel CA components, namely a new rule based Urdu CA engine which combines pattern matching and sentence/string similarity techniques along with new algorithms to process user utterances. Furthermore, a CA evaluation framework has been researched and tested which addresses the gap in research to develop the evaluation of natural language systems in general. Empirical end user evaluation has validated the new algorithms and components implemented in UMAIR. The results show that UMAIR is effective as an Urdu CA, with the majority of conversations leading to the goal of the conversation. Moreover the results also revealed that the components of the framework work well to mitigate the challenges of free word order and inconsistent word segmentation.

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Huang, Hung-Hsuan. "A generic framework for embodied conversational agent development and its applications". 京都大学 (Kyoto University), 2009. http://hdl.handle.net/2433/126470.

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Jusko, Ján. "Chatbot pro Smart Cities". Master's thesis, Vysoké učení technické v Brně. Fakulta informačních technologií, 2019. http://www.nusl.cz/ntk/nusl-403204.

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The aim of this work is to simplify access to information for citizens of the city of Brno and at the same time to innovate the way of communication between the citizen and his city. The problem is solved by creating a conversational agent - chatbot Kroko. Using artificial intelligence and a Czech language analyzer, the agent is able to understand and respond to a certain set of textual, natural language queries. The agent is available on the Messenger platform and has a knowledge base that includes data provided by the city council. After conducting an extensive user testing on a total of 76 citizens of the city, it turned out that up to 97\% of respondents like the idea of a city-oriented chatbot and can imagine using it regularly. The main finding of this work is that the general public can easily adopt and effectively use a chatbot. The results of this work motivate further development of practical applications of conversational agents.

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Shearer, John. "Persuasive interactive non-verbal behaviour in embodied conversational agents". Thesis, Newcastle upon Tyne : University of Newcastle upon Tyne, 2009. http://hdl.handle.net/10443/791.

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Doumanis, Ioannis. "Evaluating humanoid embodied conversational agents in mobile guide applications". Thesis, Middlesex University, 2013. http://eprints.mdx.ac.uk/12627/.

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Evolution in the area of mobile computing has been phenomenal in the last few years. The exploding increase in hardware power has enabled multimodal mobile interfaces to be developed. These interfaces differ from the traditional graphical user interface (GUI), in that they enable a more “natural” communication with mobile devices, through the use of multiple communication channels (e.g., multi-touch, speech recognition, etc.). As a result, a new generation of applications has emerged that provide human-like assistance in the user interface (e.g., the Siri conversational assistant (Siri Inc., visited 2010)). These conversational agents are currently designed to automate a number of tedious mobile tasks (e.g., to call a taxi), but the possible applications are endless. A domain of particular interest is that of Cultural Heritage, where conversational agents can act as personalized tour guides in, for example, archaeological attractions. The visitors to historical places have a diverse range of information needs. For example, casual visitors have different information needs from those with a deeper interest in an attraction (e.g., - holiday learners versus students). A personalized conversational agent can access a cultural heritage database, and effectively translate data into a natural language form that is adapted to the visitor’s personal needs and interests. The present research aims to investigate the information needs of a specific type of visitors, those for whom retention of cultural content is important (e.g., students of history, cultural experts, history hobbyists, educators, etc.). Embodying a conversational agent enables the agent to use additional modalities to communicate this content (e.g., through facial expressions, deictic gestures, etc.) to the user. Simulating the social norms that guide the real-world human-to-human interaction (e.g., adapting the story based on the reactions of the users), should at least theoretically optimize the cognitive accessibility of the content. Although a number of projects have attempted to build embodied conversational agents (ECAs) for cultural heritage, little is known about their impact on the users’ perceived cognitive accessibility of the cultural heritage content, and the usability of the interfaces they support. In particular, there is a general disagreement on the advantages of multimodal ECAs in terms of users’ task performance and satisfaction over nonanthropomorphised interfaces. Further, little is known about what features influence what aspects of the cognitive accessibility of the content and/or usability of the interface. To address these questions I studied the user experiences with ECA interfaces in six user studies across three countries (Greece, UK and USA). To support these studies, I introduced: a) a conceptual framework based on well-established theoretical models of human cognition, and previous frameworks from the literature. The framework offers a holistic view of the design space of ECA systems b) a research technique for evaluating the cognitive accessibility of ECA-based information presentation systems that combine data from eye tracking and facial expression recognition. In addition, I designed a toolkit, from which I partially developed its natural language processing component, to facilitate rapid development of mobile guide applications using ECAs. Results from these studies provide evidence that an ECA, capable of displaying some of the communication strategies (e.g., non-verbal behaviours to accompany linguistic information etc.) found in the real-world human guidance scenario, is not affecting and effective in enhancing the user’s ability to retain cultural content. The findings from the first two studies, suggest than an ECA has no negative/positive impact on users experiencing content that is similar (but not the same) across different locations (see experiment one, in Chapter 7), and content of variable difficulty (see experiment two, in Chapter 7). However, my results also suggest that improving the degree of content personalization and the quality of the modalities used by the ECA can result in both effective and affecting human-ECA interactions. Effectiveness is the degree to which an ECA facilitates a user in accomplishing the navigation and information tasks. Similarly, affecting is the degree to which the ECA changes the quality of the user’s experience while accomplishing the navigation and information tasks. By adhering to the above rules, I gradually improved my designs and built ECAs that are affecting. In particular, I found that an ECA can affect the quality of the user’s navigation experience (see experiment three in Chapter 7), as well as how a user experiences narrations of cultural value (see experiment five, in Chapter 8). In terms of navigation, I found sound evidence that the strongest impact of the ECAs nonverbal behaviours is on the ability of users to correctly disambiguate the navigation of an ECA instructions provided by a tour guide system. However, my ECAs failed to become effective, and to elicit enhanced navigation or retention performances. Given the positive impact of ECAs on the disambiguation of navigation instructions, the lack of ECA-effectiveness in navigation could be attributed to the simulated mobile conditions. In a real outdoor environment, where users would have to actually walk around the castle, an ECA could have elicited better navigation performance, than a system without it. With regards to retention performance, my results suggest that a designer should not solely consider the impact of an ECA, but also the style and effectiveness of the question-answering (Q&A) with the ECA, and the type of user interacting with the ECA (see experiments four and six, in Chapter 8). I found that that there is a correlation between how many questions participants asked per location for a tour, and the information they retained after the completion of the tour. When participants were requested to ask the systems a specific number of questions per location, they could retain more information than when they were allowed to freely ask questions. However, the constrained style of interaction decreased their overall satisfaction with the systems. Therefore, when enhanced retention performance is needed, a designer should consider strategies that should direct users to ask a specific number of questions per location for a tour. On the other hand, when maintaining the positive levels of user experiences is the desired outcome of an interaction, users should be allowed to freely ask questions. Then, the effectiveness of the Q&A session is of importance to the success/failure of the user’s interaction with the ECA. In a natural-language question-answering system, the system often fails to understand the user’s question and, by default, it asks the user to rephrase again. A problem arises when the system fails to understand a question repeatedly. I found that a repetitive request to rephrase the same question annoys participants and affects their retention performance. Therefore, in order to ensure effective human-ECA Q&A, the repeat messages should be built in a way to allow users to figure out how to ask the system questions to avoid improper responses. Then, I found strong evidence that an ECA may be effective for some type of users, while for some others it may be not. I found that an ECA with an attention-grabbing mechanism (see experiment six, in Chapter 8), had an inverse effect on the retention performance of participants with different gender. In particular, it enhanced the retention performance of the male participants, while it degraded the retention performance of the female participants. Finally, a series of tentative design recommendations for the design of both affecting and effective ECAs in mobile guide applications in derived from the work undertaken. These are aimed at ECA researchers and mobile guide designers.

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Kumar, Rohit. "Socially Capable Conversational Agents for Multi-Party Interactive Situations". Research Showcase @ CMU, 2011. http://repository.cmu.edu/dissertations/162.

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Since the inception of AI research, great strides have been made towards achieving the goal of extending natural language conversation as a medium of interaction with machines. Today, we find many Conversational Agents (CAs) situated in various aspects of our everyday life such as information access, education and entertainment. However, most of the existing work on CAs has focused on agents that support only one user in each interactive session. On the other hand, people organize themselves in groups such as teams of co-workers, family and networks of friends. With the mass-adoption of Internet based communication technologies for group interaction, there is an unprecedented opportunity for CAs to support interactive situations involving multiple human participants. Support provided by these CAs can make the functioning of some of these groups more efficient, enjoyable and rewarding to the participants. Through our work on supporting various Multi-Party Interactive Situations (MPIS), we have identified two problems that must be addressed in order to embed effective CAs in such situations. The first problem highlights the technical challenges involving the development of CAs in MPIS. Existing approaches for modeling agent behavior make assumptions that break down in multi-party interaction. As a step towards addressing this problem, this thesis contributes the Basilica software architecture that uses an event-driven approach to model conversation as an orchestration of triggering of conversational behaviors. This architecture alleviates the technical problems by providing a rich representational capability and the flexibility to address complex interaction dynamics. The second problem involves the choice of appropriate agent behaviors. In MPIS, agents must compete with human participants for attention in order to effectively deliver support and interventions. In this work, we follow a model of human group interaction developed by empirical research in small group communication. This model identifies two fundamental processes in human group interaction, i.e., Instrumental (Task-related) and Expressive (Social-Emotional). Behaviors that constitute this expressive process hold the key to managing and regulating user attention and serve other social functions in group interaction. This thesis describes two socially capable conversational agents that support users in collaborative learning and group decision making activities. Their social capabilities are composed of a set of behaviors based on the Social-Emotional interaction categories identified by work in small group communication. These agents demonstrate the generalizability of our methodology for designing and implementing social capabilities across two very different interactive situations. In addition to the implementation of these agents, the thesis presents a series of experiments and analysis conducted to investigate the effectiveness of these social capabilities. First and foremost, these experiments show significant benefits of the use of socially capable agents on task success and agent perception across the two different interactive situations listed above. Second, they investigate issues related to the appropriate use of these social capabilities specifically in terms of the amount and timing of the constituent social behaviors. Finally, these experiments provide an understanding of the underlying mechanism that explains the effects that social capabilities can achieve.

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Yan, Hao 1973. "Paired speech and gesture generation in embodied conversational agents". Thesis, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2000. http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/70733.

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Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, School of Architecture and Planning, Program in Media Arts and Sciences, 2000.
Includes bibliographical references (p. 68-71).
Using face-to-face conversation as an interface metaphor, an embodied conversational agent is likely to be easier to use and learn than traditional graphical user interfaces. To make a believable agent that to some extent has the same social and conversational skills as humans do, the embodied conversational agent system must be able to deal with input of the user from different communication modalities such as speech and gesture, as well as generate appropriate behaviors for those communication modalities. In this thesis, I address the problem of paired speech and gesture generation in embodied conversational agents. I propose a real-time generation framework that is capable of generating a comprehensive description of communicative actions, including speech, gesture, and intonation, in the real-estate domain. The generation of speech, gesture, and intonation are based on the same underlying representation of real-estate properties, discourse information structure, intentional and attentional structures, and a mechanism to update the common ground between the user and the agent. Algorithms have been implemented to analyze the discourse information structure, contrast, and surprising semantic features, which together decide the intonation contour of the speech utterances and where gestures occur. I also investigate through a correlational study the role of communicative goals in determining the distribution of semantic features across speech and gesture modalities.
by Hao Yan.
S.M.

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Doolin, Simon Peter. "Usability engineering for embodied conversational agents with older users". Thesis, University of Edinburgh, 2014. http://hdl.handle.net/1842/17967.

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It is projected that by the year 2033, 41% of the population in the United Kingdom will be aged 60 and over, compared to 17% in 2010. However, as people get older, age-related impairments to working memory and cognition, as well as sensory impairments, mean that older adults struggle to adopt new information technology systems, which have become integral to everyday life in recent years. The research presented here investigates, across a series of three large scale experiments, how Embodied Conversational Agents (ECAs) can be used in virtual world applications, addressing three important domains of application space, to understand how ECAs may be used to engage with older users. The Virtual Banking Experiment investigates whether or not ECA gender or age portrayal has an effect on overall usability of virtual world applications for older users. The results of the experiment show that older users do not exhibit a significant preference for a particular ECA gender, however they do exhibit a preference for interacting with younger ECAs when compared with older ECAs in these applications. Results of the Entertainment Experiment show that scripting the interaction, between older users and ECAs in a virtual world quiz game, significantly improved the usability of these virtual world gaming applications employing ECAs as interlocators. The Social Support Experiment investigated three styles of providing advice to older users as part of a virtual advice bureau service. The results of the experiment show that older users prefer to receive advice from ECAs that has not been presented as having been obtained from real-world experiences.

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Simmons, Carl Benjamin. "Usability design of embodied conversational agents on handheld devices". Thesis, University of Edinburgh, 2014. http://hdl.handle.net/1842/17962.

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Embodied Conversational Agents (ECAs) potentially represent a way to deliver services to the public that would previously have require human staff. Making an ECA available online allows out-of-hours access to information and services, as well as allowing users to access the information anywhere there is an internet connection. As handheld devices grow in popularity and become the primary source of internet connection for many users, it is necessary to examine whether an ECA is appropriate for use on a handheld device, and what factors affect its usability. Over the course of four experiments this research examines how using a handheld device is different from using a PC, how an ECA should be presented on a handheld device, how using an ECA service in a public space affects the experience, and how an ECA should interact with users. It was determined that the usability of an ECA service is not affected by the device on which it is experienced, that on smaller screens or in demanding environments the ECA should be emphasised, and that text should be included in an ECA service as long as the ECA remains intermittently visible. It was also found that usability results from the laboratory can be generalised to the real world, that ECA services are appropriate for all ages and genders, that incorporating disclosure elements into an ECA service is a beneficial feature, and that while financial topics are appropriate to be discussed with an ECA, they are best kept to general rather than personal information. The following chapters present the necessary literary background to the field, before covering each experiment individually, and finally presenting detailed conclusions about the usability of ECAs on handheld devices.

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