Дисертації з теми "Agent conversationel"
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1
Pistilli, Giada. "Pour une éthique de l'intelligence artificielle conversationnelle." Electronic Thesis or Diss., Sorbonne université, 2024. http://www.theses.fr/2024SORUL038.
Анотація:
Cette recherche vise à sonder les complexités éthiques de l'intelligence artificielle (IA) conversationnelle, en se concentrant spécifiquement sur les grands modèles de langage et les agents conversationnels. Ce manuscrit construit un cadre qui allie l'analyse empirique au discours philosophique. Notre objectif est de plaider de toute urgence en faveur d'une structure éthique bien fondée pour l'IA conversationnelle, en soulignant la nécessité d'impliquer toutes les parties prenantes, des développeurs aux utilisateurs finaux. Tout d'abord, nous défendons l'intégration de l'ingénierie et d'autres disciplines scientifiques avec la philosophie, facilitant ainsi une compréhension plus nuancée des dimensions éthiques qui sous-tendent l'IA. Cette approche collaborative permet un discours éthique plus riche et mieux informé. Deuxièmement, nous préconisons l'utilisation dynamique de cadres éthiques appliqués en tant que guides fondamentaux pour la définition des objectifs initiaux d'un système d'IA. Ces cadres servent d'outils évolutifs qui s'adaptent aux complexités éthiques rencontrées au cours du développement et du déploiement. Enfin, sur la base d'une recherche pratique et interdisciplinaire, nous plaidons en faveur de la priorisation de l'IA étroite et spécifique à une tâche par rapport à l'intelligence artificielle générale, une position qui repose sur la faisabilité accrue de la surveillance éthique et de la contrôlabilité technique.Avec cette recherche, nous souhaitons contribuer à la littérature sur l'éthique de l'IA, en enrichissant le discours académique à la fois en philosophie et en informatiqueThis research aims to probe the ethical intricacies of conversational Artificial Intelligence (AI), specifically focusing on Large Language Models and conversational agents. This manuscript constructs a framework that melds empirical analysis with philosophical discourse. We aim to urgently advocate for a well-founded ethical structure for conversational AI, highlighting the necessity to involve all stakeholders, from developers to end-users. Firstly, we champion the integration of engineering and other scientific disciplines with philosophy, facilitating a more nuanced understanding of the ethical dimensions underpinning AI. This collaborative approach allows for a richer, more informed ethical discourse. Secondly, we advocate for the dynamic use of applied ethical frameworks as foundational guides for setting the initial objectives of an AI system. These frameworks serve as evolving tools that adapt to the ethical complexities encountered during development and deployment. Lastly, grounded in hands-on, interdisciplinary research, we make an argument for the prioritization of narrow, task-specific AI over Artificial General Intelligence, a stance that is based on the enhanced feasibility of ethical oversight and technical controllability.With this research, we aim to contribute to the literature on AI ethics, enriching the academic discourse in both philosophy and computer science
2
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.
3
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.
Анотація:
PONTIFÍCIA UNIVERSIDADE CATÓLICA DO RIO DE JANEIROCOORDENAÇÃO 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.
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.
Анотація:
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.
5
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.
Анотація:
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.
6
Ly, Eric Thich Vi. "Chatter--a conversational telephone agent." Thesis, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1993. http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/29067.
7
Rystedt, Beata, and 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.
Анотація:
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.
8
Jumaah, Ahmed Salih Fadhil. "Conversational Agent for Health Coaching." Doctoral thesis, University of Trento, 2019. http://eprints-phd.biblio.unitn.it/3557/1/ahmed_jumaah_phd_thesis.pdf.
Анотація:
Poor diet and physical inactivity are two of the biggest healthcare challenges we are facing, and are related to individuals lifestyle. In fact, a poor lifestyle is strongly correlated to chronic diseases, the leading causes for morbidity and mortality. Adhering to a healthy diet and following an active lifestyle are thus necessary to promote the overall health. However, maintaining a healthy diet and physically active lifestyle is hard. This is due to poor health literacy, lack of awareness, motivation and effective
intervention support. Recent years have seen a blast of mHealth apps for health promotion, targeting in particular dietary behavior change. However, reviews showed
difficulties in effective adoption and use of these applications in long-term health promotion. Contemporary approaches have focused on tracking user condition and
few have analyzed aspects of user interaction with the system. To promote individuals health, users can benefit from some form of tailored guidance or coaching. That said, to ensure adequate users support, personalized care with
a human agent in the loop can enhance the care delivery. Due to the increasing demand for continuous care by users and the shortage of caregiver resources, current health services are inefficient relative to user support and decreasing caregivers workload. Digital health devices can act as a key player in providing interactive health activities
(via mobile and telemedicine systems), enhancing self-monitoring (through wearable tracker) and tailored coaching (using either automated or manual coaching systems).
However, they’re ineffective in providing continuous health services and creating a balance between users support and caregivers workload. In addition, even with the
technology existence, there is low motivation to maintain a healthy diet or exercise routines. Individuals use messaging applications as part of their regular daily routines. We
harness the power of messaging chatbot systems to provide behavior change interventions for healthy lifestyle promotion. We particularly introduce the role of chatbot in task automation and adhering users to a health plan. Thus, in this thesis we present the concept of "Conversational User Interface in Health Coaching Interventions" that consists of a just-in-time health services to users and caregivers. We discuss ways to integrate the chatbot to assist caregivers with their tasks and support
users with their condition. We get users to cue themselves to action by attaching the chatbot with users’ daily messaging routines. The service will eliminate the
technology barrier and impairment for the users i.e., elderly. The chatbot accesses reliable user compliance data, sets adherence reminders by condition, and reports
daily individuals adherence. The chatbot alerts the coach through a web application in critical cases. The approach facilitates adherence to health interventions by
investigating a human-virtual agent mediated coaching approach on user motivation to adhere to the health promotion plan. The approach was validated with different experimentation phases. Using multiple research methods, this dissertation has made several contributions to the understanding of user motivation and the role of a semi-automated system with a human and virtual agent in tracking individuals with poor lifestyle. We will discuss the main
contributions and experimentation results throughout the thesis.
9
Ravenet, Brian. "Modélisation de comportements non-verbaux et d'attitudes sociales dans la simulation de groupes conversationnels." Thesis, Paris, ENST, 2015. http://www.theses.fr/2015ENST0075/document.
Анотація:
Les Agents Conversationnels Animés sont des personnages virtuels dont la fonction principale est d'interagir avec l'utilisateur. Ils sont utilisés dans différents domaines tels que l'assistance personnelle, l'entrainement social ou les jeux vidéo et afin d'améliorer leur potentiel, il est possible de leur donner la capacité d'exprimer des comportements similaires à ceux des humains. Les utilisateurs, conscient d'interagir avec une machine, sont tout de même capable d'analyser et d'identifier des comportements sociaux à travers les signaux émis par les agents. La recherche en ACA s'est longtemps intéressée aux mécanismes de reproduction et de reconnaissance des émotions au sein de ces personnages virtuels et maintenant l'intérêt se porte sur la capacité d'exprimer différentes attitudes sociales. Ces attitudes reflètent un style comportemental et s'expriment à travers différentes modalités du corps comme les expressions faciales, les regards ou les gestes par exemple. Nous avons proposé un modèle permettant à un agent de produire différents comportements non-verbaux traduisant l'expression d'attitudes sociales dans une conversation. L'ensemble des comportements générés par notre modèle permettent à un groupe d'agents animés par celui-ci de simuler une conversation, sans tenir compte du contenu verbal. Deux évaluations du modèle ont été conduites, l'une sur Internet et l'autre dans un environnement de réalité virtuelle, afin de vérifier que les attitudes étaient bien reconnuesEmbodied Conversational Agents are virtual characters which main purpose is to interact with a human user. They are used in various domains such as personal assistance, social training or video games for instance. In order to improve their capabilities, it is possible to give them the ability to produce human-like behaviors. The users, even if they are aware that they interact with a machine, are still capable of analyzing and identifying social behaviors through the signals produced by these virtual characters. The research in Embodied Conversational Agents has focused for a long time on the reproduction and recognition of emotions by virtual characters and now the focus is on the ability to express different social attitudes. These attitudes show a behavioral style and are expressed through different modalities of the body, like the facial expressions, the gestures or the gazes for instance. We proposed a model that allows an agent to produce different nonverbal behaviors expressing different social attitudes in a conversation. The whole set of behaviors produced by our model allows a goup of agents animated by it to simulate a conversation, without any verbal content. Two evaluations of the model were conducted, one on the Internet and one in a Virtual Reality environment, to verify that the attitudes produced are well recognized
10
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.
11
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.
Анотація:
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.
12
Jégou, Mathieu. "Coordination des tours de parole par le couplage sensorimoteur continu entre utilisateurs et agents." Thesis, Brest, 2016. http://www.theses.fr/2016BRES0061/document.
Анотація:
Nous présentons dans cette thèse un modèle pour la coordination de la parole dans des interactions dyadiques utilisateur-agent. Selon une approche courante, coordonner la parole reviendrait à éviter les recouvrements de parole et à minimiser les moments de silence entre deux tours, ceci pour rendre plus fluide l’interaction avec l’agent et améliorer l’expérience de l’utilisateur en interaction dialogique avec l’agent. Les interactions humaines montrent néanmoins une coordination plus complexe avec des recouvrements de parole compétitifs ou non compétitifs et des moments de silences longs. Selon notre approche, c’est en permettant cette diversité des situations que nous verrons émerger, entre l’utilisateur et l’agent, une interaction plus fluide et plus crédible, améliorant l’expérience de l’utilisateur avec l’agent. Les échanges de paroles sont néanmoins, par nature, complexes, la coordination se faisant par l’interaction entre locuteur et auditeur plus que par un participant en particulier. Pour capturer cette complexité, nous avons élaboré un modèle mettant l’accent sur une coordination de la parole basée sur un couplage sensorimoteur continu. Sur la base de ce couplage sensorimoteur, le comportement de l’agent n’est pas entièrement contrôlé par ce dernier, mais est émergent de l’interaction entre les participants. Nous montrons la capacité de notre modèle à faire émerger les différentes situations liées à la coordination de la parole humaine à la fois dans une interaction entre deux agents et dans une interaction utilisateur-agentIn this thesis, we present a model for the coordination of speaking turns in dyadic interactions between users and agents. According to a common view, to coordinate turns means avoiding overlaps and reduces silences between turns. By optimizing turn transitions between users and agents, the user’s experience is expected to be improved. However, observations of human conversations show a more complex coordination of speaking turns between users and agents: awkward silences and overlaps, competitive or not, are common. In order to improve the credibility and the naturalness of the interaction, we must observe the same variability of situations in a user-agent interaction. Nevertheless, coordination of speaking turns is, by nature, complex, the coordination is managed by the interaction between participants more than controlled by one participant alone. To capture this complexity, we elaborated a model emphasizing the continuous sensory-motor coupling existing between the user and the agent. As a result of this sensory-motor coupling, the behavior of the agent is not entirely controlled by the agent but is an emergent property of the interaction between the user and the agent. We show the capacity of our model to make emerge the different situations linked to the coordination of speaking turns in interactions between two agents and between one user and one agent
13
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.
14
Alobaidi, Omar. "Arabic conversational agent for modern Islamic education." Thesis, Manchester Metropolitan University, 2015. http://e-space.mmu.ac.uk/309/.
Анотація:
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.
15
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.
Анотація:
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.
16
Venter, Wessel Johannes. "An embodied conversational agent with autistic behaviour." Thesis, Stellenbosch : Stellenbosch University, 2012. http://hdl.handle.net/10019.1/20115.
Анотація:
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.
17
Camargo, Michelle. "Modèle de communication affective pour agent conversationnel animé, basé sur des facettes de personnalité et des buts de communication "cachés"." Phd thesis, Université de Grenoble, 2012. http://tel.archives-ouvertes.fr/tel-00721769.
Анотація:
Les Agents Conversationnels Animés (ACA) sont des personnages virtuels interactifs et expressifs, dont l'aspect est très souvent " humain ", exploitant différentes modalités telles que la face, le langage, les gestes, le regard ou encore la prosodie de la voix. Le but est qu'ils s'expriment en langage naturel et puissent dialoguer avec des interlocuteurs humains. Pour développer un ACA, il faut d'abord comprendre que des aspects tels que personnalité, les émotions et leur apparence sont extrêmement importants. Le travail qui est présenté dans cette thèse a pour objectif d'augmenter l'acceptabilité et la crédibilité des agents au moyen de la personnalité, considérée comme une notion centrale à l'interaction ACA-humain. On propose un modèle qui dote l'ACA de facettes de personnalité et de buts de communication " cachés " et qui module ainsi ses actions conversationnelles. Ce travail présente également une application de jeu de type "puzzle", intégrant un ACA doté de facettes de personnalité et de buts " cachés ", qui a servi de support à plusieurs expérimentations et à l'évaluation du modèle proposé.
18
ZUCCA, MARIO. "The economics of Conversational Agents." Doctoral thesis, Università degli studi di Genova, 2020. http://hdl.handle.net/11567/1006351.
Анотація:
For many years software has been developed to automate the internal processes of a company. Over the years we have learned to measure the cost / benefit ratio linked to the introduction of new automation tools. We have also figured out how to define a strategy that allows introduction into the company by minimizing risks and maximizing returns. This implies the launch of initiatives aimed at preparing the organization for the changes that will be induced through the creation of new features.
However, in the last period we are observing a constant growth in the demand for new automation models that can make the most of recent scientific advances made in the field of cognitive services. In recent years we have witnessed the introduction of new automation services for the processes borrowed from the experiences made in the field of robotics and adapted to more complex business models. With the advent of increasingly sophisticated cognitive services we can easily imagine how, by combining RPA tools with cognitive services, we can significantly extend the services that companies can offer.
In fact, we can think of automating certain business processes by integrating cognitive services, allowing us to add a new dimension of intervention, allowing the system to interact using natural language. We can briefly define these new tools as conversational agents.
There are already several concrete implementations of these technologies that are abandoning the field of research to try their hand at the industrial world. We are in fact witnessing a progressive spread of conversational platforms also in the consumer sphere. Some of the most concrete examples that have had an important commercial success are Google Home®, Alexa®, Siri®, Cortana® etc. Such a significant success that the concept of virtual assistant is cleared through.
The main companies have begun the introduction of these technologies through the implementation of simple chatbots which, however, are changing the main way of interacting with customers through the progressive replacement of traditional call centers. However, many decision makers remain doubting about the claims surrounding the promised business value of the conversational platforms. Potential adopters must be informed about the true value and economic returns of the technological investments needed to introduce these new tools into organizations.
In this work we want to define precisely what the conversational agents are and provide a solid economic model that allows to estimate what are the factors that influence the adoption of this technology and the economic returns of the investments.
19
Yacoubi, Alya. "Vers des agents conversationnels capables de réguler leurs émotions : un modèle informatique des tendances à l’action." Thesis, Université Paris-Saclay (ComUE), 2019. http://www.theses.fr/2019SACLS378/document.
Анотація:
Les agents virtuels conversationnels ayant un comportement social reposent souvent sur au moins deux disciplines différentes : l’informatique et la psychologie. Dans la plupart des cas, les théories psychologiques sont converties en un modèle informatique afin de permettre aux agents d’adopter des comportements crédibles. Nos travaux de thèse se positionnent au croisement de ces deux champs disciplinaires. Notre objectif est de renforcer la crédibilité des agents conversationnels. Nous nous intéressons aux agents conversationnels orientés tâche, qui sont utilisés dans un contexte professionnel pour produire des réponses à partir d’une base de connaissances métier. Nous proposons un modèle affectif pour ces agents qui s’inspire des mécanismes affectifs chez l’humain. L’approche que nous avons choisie de mettre en œuvre dans notre modèle s’appuie sur la théorie des Tendances à l’Action en psychologie. Nous avons proposé un modèle des émotions en utilisant un formalisme inspiré de la logique BDI pour représenter les croyances et les buts de l’agent. Ce modèle a été implémenté dans une architecture d’agent conversationnel développée au sein de l’entreprise DAVI. Afin de confirmer la pertinence de notre approche, nous avons réalisé plusieurs études expérimentales. La première porte sur l’évaluation d’expressions verbales de la tendance à l’action. La deuxième porte sur l’impact des différentes stratégies de régulation possibles sur la perception de l’agent par l’utilisateur. Enfin, la troisième étude porte sur l’évaluation des agents affectifs en interaction avec des participants. Nous montrons que le processus de régulation que nous avons implémenté permet d’augmenter la crédibilité et le professionnalisme perçu des agents, et plus généralement qu’ils améliorent l’interaction. Nos résultats mettent ainsi en avant la nécessité de prendre en considération les deux mécanismes émotionnels complémentaires : la génération et la régulation des réponses émotionnelles. Ils ouvrent des perspectives sur les différentes manières de gérer les émotions et leur impact sur la perception de l’agentConversational virtual agents with social behavior are often based on at least two different disciplines : computer science and psychology. In most cases, psychological findings are converted into computational mechanisms in order to make agents look and behave in a believable manner. In this work, we aim at increasing conversational agents’ belivielibity and making human-agent interaction more natural by modelling emotions. More precisely, we are interested in task-oriented conversational agents, which are used as a custumer-relationship channel to respond to users request. We propose an affective model of emotional responses’ generation and control during a task-oriented interaction. Our proposed model is based, on one hand, on the theory of Action Tendencies (AT) in psychology to generate emotional responses during the interaction. On the other hand, the emotional control mechanism is inspired from social emotion regulation in empirical psychology. Both mechanisms use agent’s goals, beliefs and ideals. This model has been implemented in an agent architecture endowed with a natural language processing engine developed by the company DAVI. In order to confirm the relevance of our approach, we realized several experimental studies. The first was about validating verbal expressions of action tendency in a human-agent dialogue. In the second, we studied the impact of different emotional regulation strategies on the agent perception by the user. This study allowed us to design a social regulation algorithm based on theoretical and empirical findings. Finally, the third study focuses on the evaluation of emotional agents in real-time interactions. Our results show that the regulation process contributes in increasing the credibility and perceived competence of agents as well as in improving the interaction. Our results highlight the need to take into consideration of the two complementary emotional mechanisms : the generation and regulation of emotional responses. They open perspectives on different ways of managing emotions and their impact on the perception of the agent
20
Xiao, He. "An affective personality for an embodied conversational agent /." Full text available, 2007. http://adt.curtin.edu.au/theses/available/adt-WCU20080417.145203.
21
Xiao, He. "An affective personality for an embodied conversational agent." Thesis, Curtin University, 2006. http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.11937/167.
Анотація:
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.
22
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.
Анотація:
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.
23
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.
Анотація:
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.
24
Biancardi, Béatrice. "Les premières secondes comptent : gérer les premières impressions pour un agent virtuel plus engageant." Electronic Thesis or Diss., Sorbonne université, 2019. https://accesdistant.sorbonne-universite.fr/login?url=https://theses-intra.sorbonne-universite.fr/2019SORUS037.pdf.
Анотація:
Les premiers instants d'une interaction avec un personnage virtuel sont critiques, car les impressions que les utilisateurs se forgent à leur sujet peuvent affecter le reste de l'interaction, en termes d'engagement et de volonté de poursuivre l’interaction. Dans cette thèse, nous présentons un modèle computationnel pour un agent virtuel pour gérer les impressions de chaleur et de compétence (C&C), les deux dimensions fondamentales de la cognition sociale, que se forge l’utilisateur. Le but de l'agent est d'adapter son comportement non verbal en temps réel pendant une interaction, en fonction des réactions non verbales de l'utilisateur. Notre approche part de l'analyse d'un corpus d'interactions humaines afin d'identifier un ensemble de comportements non verbaux suscitant la perception de différents degrés de C&C. Une étude perceptive a examiné comment ces comportements sont perçus lorsqu'ils sont réalisés par un agent virtuel. Un algorithme d'apprentissage par renforcement a été développé pour permettre à l'agent d'apprendre en temps réel les comportements qui donnent la meilleure impression à l'utilisateur, en fonction de son objectif. Les réactions non verbales de l'utilisateur (calculées à partir de signaux de bas niveau telles que les unités d'action du visage) sont utilisées comme récompense pour l'algorithme. Nous avons personnalisé le modèle afin d'adapter les comportements de l'agent dans le but de maximiser l'engagement de l'utilisateur ou ses impressions sur la C&C de l'agent. 2 cas d'utilisation ont été menés afin d'évaluer l'impact d'un agent adaptatif sur les impressions de l’utilisateur et sa perception de l'interaction, par rapport à un agent non adaptatifThe first moments of an interaction with a virtual character are critical since users form impressions about them, which can affect the rest of the interaction, in terms of engagement and willingness to continue it. In this Thesis we present a computational model for managing user’s impression of agent’s warmth and competence (W&C), the 2 fundamentals dimensions of social cognition. The goal of the agent is to adapt its non-verbal behaviour in real-time during an interaction, according to user’s non-verbal reactions. Our approach starts from the analysis of a corpus of human-human interactions in order to identify a set of non-verbal behaviours eliciting different degrees of W&C. A perceptual study then investigated how these behaviours are perceived when performed by a virtual agent. A reinforcement learning (RL) algorithm has been developed to allow the agent to learn in real-time the behaviours which give the best impression to the user, according to its goal. User’s non-verbal reactions (computed from low-level signals such as facial action units) are used as a reward for the RL. We have personalized the computational model in order to adapt the agent’s behaviours with the goal of maximizing user’s engagement or impressions of agent’s W&C. Two use cases have been run in order to evaluate the impact of an adapting agent on user’s impressions and perception of the interaction, compared to a non-adapting agent. In the first experiment the agent adapted its self-presentational strategies in order to maximise user’s engagement. In the second one the agent learned the best combinations of non-verbal behaviours to display in order to maximise user’s impressions of its W&C
25
Xiao, Jun. "Empirical Studies on Embodied Conversational Agents." Diss., Georgia Institute of Technology, 2006. http://hdl.handle.net/1853/14080.
Анотація:
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.
26
Smith, Cameron G. "Cognitive aspects of embodied conversational agents." Thesis, Teesside University, 2013. http://hdl.handle.net/10149/301618.
Анотація:
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.
27
Chang, Joey 1975. "Action scheduling in humanoid conversational agents." Thesis, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1998. http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/31079.
Анотація:
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.
28
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.
Анотація:
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.
29
Panesar, Kulvinder. "Functional linguistic based motivations for a conversational software agent." Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2019. http://hdl.handle.net/10454/18134.
Анотація:
NoThis 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.
30
Rajagopal, Manoj Kumar. "Cloning with gesture expressivity." Phd thesis, Institut National des Télécommunications, 2012. http://tel.archives-ouvertes.fr/tel-00719301.
Анотація:
Virtual environments allow human beings to be represented by virtual humans or avatars. Users can share a sense of virtual presence is the avatar looks like the real human it represents. This classically involves turning the avatar into a clone with the real human's appearance and voice. However, the possibility of cloning the gesture expressivity of a real person has received little attention so far. Gesture expressivity combines the style and mood of a person. Expressivity parameters have been defined in earlier works for animating embodied conversational agents.In this work, we focus on expressivity in wrist motion. First, we propose algorithms to estimate three expressivity parameters from captured wrist 3D trajectories: repetition, spatial extent and temporal extent. Then, we conducted perceptual study through a user survey the relevance of expressivity for recognizing individual human. We have animated a virtual agent using the expressivity estimated from individual humans, and users have been asked whether they can recognize the individual human behind each animation. We found that, in case gestures are repeated in the animation, this is perceived by users as a discriminative feature to recognize humans, while the absence of repetition would be matched with any human, regardless whether they repeat gesture or not. More importantly, we found that 75 % or more of users could recognize the real human (out of two proposed) from an animated virtual avatar based only on the spatial and temporal extents. Consequently, gesture expressivity is a relevant clue for cloning. It can be used as another element in the development of a virtual clone that represents a person
31
Okamoto, Masayuki. "Design and applications of learning conversational agents." 京都大学 (Kyoto University), 2003. http://hdl.handle.net/2433/148780.
32
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.
Анотація:
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
33
Nooraei, Beidokht Bahador. "A Real-Time Architecture for Conversational Agents." Digital WPI, 2012. https://digitalcommons.wpi.edu/etd-theses/972.
Анотація:
"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."
34
Moyo, Sharon G. "Effective tutoring with empathic embodied conversational agents." Thesis, Open University, 2014. http://oro.open.ac.uk/40803/.
Анотація:
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.
35
Osathanunkul, Khukrit. "Semantic similarity framework for Thai conversational agents." Thesis, Manchester Metropolitan University, 2014. http://e-space.mmu.ac.uk/336070/.
Анотація:
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.
36
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.
Анотація:
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.
37
Boucaud, Fabien. "Un agent touchant : modélisation du toucher social dans les interactions humain-agent en environnement immersif." Thesis, Compiègne, 2021. http://www.theses.fr/2021COMP2666.
Анотація:
Malgré la puissance de nos technologies de communication actuelles pour maintenir du contact social dans des situations extrêmes, elles restent insuffisantes pour totalement combler les sentiments de solitude et d'isolement. Le toucher social, est essentiel au bien-être humain, nous permet de développer et raffermir nos liens relationnels et est un puissant canal de communication des émotions. Le présent travail de thèse s'intéresse à la façon dont on peut munir des agents artificiels de capacités de toucher social. Qu'il s'agisse de robots ou de personnages virtuels, ces nouvelles entités sociales sont déjà équipées de nombreuses modalités d'interaction (paroles, gestes, expressions faciales, etc.), et munir ces nouveaux types d’entités sociales de capacités de toucher pourrait améliorer encore leurs capacités émotionnelles et relationnelles. Plus particulièrement, notre principale question de recherche est de déterminer quand et comment toucher u and allowsn humain de manière utile, autonome et respectueuse. A cet effet, nous proposons une structure théorique et une implémentation fonctionnelle d'un agent touchant capable d'interagir dynamiquement avec un humain en temps réel, au sein d'un environnement immersif. En particulier, nous décrivons un module de perception des comportements de l'humain, un modèle de décision qui prenne en compte la cohérence et l'acceptabilité du toucher en contexte, et une interface haptique SOFTLY qui puisse être utilisée en immersion dans un environnement virtuel. Les évaluations de ces développements mettent en lumière les capacités prometteuses de ce framework, ainsi que ses limites actuelles et perspectives d'amélioration pour des travaux futursDespite the current abilities of our communication technologies, they remain unable to completely counterbalance feelings of isolation and loneliness. Social touch is essential to human well-being and allows us to develop and strenghten our relationships. It is also powerful channel of emotional communication. This thesis work is aimed at endowing artificial agents with social touch abilities. Whether they are robotic or virtual artificial agents represent new kinds of social entities and are already equipped with many interactional modalities (speech, gestures, facial expressions, etc.). Endowing them with touching abilities could further enhance their abilities to communicate emotions and to bond with humans. More specifically, our main research question is to determine when and how to touch a human is meaningful, autonomous and respectful way. To answer this question, we propose a theoretical structure and a functional implementation of a touching agent, able to dynamically interact with a human in real-time in an immersive environment. We describe a perception module to detect the human’s behaviour, a decision model able to take coherence and acceptability of touch into account, and a haptic interface (SOFTLY) that can be used in the immersive setup to generate haptic feedback. Evaluations of this framework are discussed and hightlight that its abilities are promising, althought there are still clear avenues of improvement for the model
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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/.
Анотація:
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.
Анотація:
yesThis 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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Panesar, Kulvinder. "Motivating a linguistically orientated model for a conversational software agent." FungramKB.com, 2018. http://hdl.handle.net/10454/18135.
Анотація:
YesThis 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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Raidt, Edith H. "Regard et communication face-à-face entre un locuteur humain et un agent conversationnel animé : attention mutuelle et monstration multimodale." Grenoble INPG, 2008. http://www.theses.fr/2008INPG0034.
Анотація:
Dans le contexte de la génération synthétique et le décodage d'informations linguistiques, non seulement le composant auditif mais aussi le composant visuel de la parole transmettent de l'information précieuse. Nous étudions le regard en tant qu´élément crucial pour enrichir la parole et fournir des informations supplémentaires. Le regard est un geste déictique très important, ainsi il influence de manières variées l'organisation du dialogue et de l'interaction sociale. Dans une première expérience nous étudions comment le regard d'une tête parlante peut être employé comme geste déictique dans un jeu de recherche et sélection sur un écran d'ordinateur. Nous avons trouvé que ces gestes sont capables de réduire le temps de réaction ainsi que la charge cognitive. Cet effet est accentué quand le geste est de caractère multimodal, utilisant la parole de manière adaptée. Dans une deuxième expérience nous avons étudié le rapport entre le regard d'un sujet cible et les différents éléments d'une interaction dialogique. Nous avons défini différents segments dans l'échange d'information dialogique et avons trouvé qu´ils sont liés aux variations du comportement du regard mesuré. Basé sur ces résultats nous proposons un modèle pour le contrôle du regard d'un agent conversationnel animé dans l'interaction face-à-faceIn the context of synthetic generation and decoding of linguistic information, not only the audible component but also the visual component of speech conveys valuable information. We address gaze as an important modality to enhance speech and to convey additional information. Gaze is an important deictic gesture as well as it plays various roles in the organization of dialogue and social interaction. In a first experiment, we investigated how the gaze of a talking head can be used as a deictic gesture in an on-screen search and retrieval task. We found that such gestures are appropriate to reduce processing time as well as cognitive load. Multimodal gestures incorporating speech in a coherent way showed to be more efficient than only visual gestures. In a second experiment, we investigated the relations between the gaze of a target subject and different elements of conversational interaction. We defined different stages in the dialogic exchange of information and found that these are related to the variations in the measured gaze behavior. Based on the observed characteristics we propose a model to control the gaze of an embodied conversational agent in close dyadic interaction
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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.
Анотація:
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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Hunt, Janey. "Conversations : the socially engaged artist as environmental change agent." Thesis, University of Plymouth, 2011. http://hdl.handle.net/10026.1/817.
Анотація:
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.
44
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.
Анотація:
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 humaineEmbodied 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
45
Ravenet, Brian. "Modélisation de comportements non-verbaux et d'attitudes sociales dans la simulation de groupes conversationnels." Electronic Thesis or Diss., Paris, ENST, 2015. http://www.theses.fr/2015ENST0075.
Анотація:
Les Agents Conversationnels Animés sont des personnages virtuels dont la fonction principale est d'interagir avec l'utilisateur. Ils sont utilisés dans différents domaines tels que l'assistance personnelle, l'entrainement social ou les jeux vidéo et afin d'améliorer leur potentiel, il est possible de leur donner la capacité d'exprimer des comportements similaires à ceux des humains. Les utilisateurs, conscient d'interagir avec une machine, sont tout de même capable d'analyser et d'identifier des comportements sociaux à travers les signaux émis par les agents. La recherche en ACA s'est longtemps intéressée aux mécanismes de reproduction et de reconnaissance des émotions au sein de ces personnages virtuels et maintenant l'intérêt se porte sur la capacité d'exprimer différentes attitudes sociales. Ces attitudes reflètent un style comportemental et s'expriment à travers différentes modalités du corps comme les expressions faciales, les regards ou les gestes par exemple. Nous avons proposé un modèle permettant à un agent de produire différents comportements non-verbaux traduisant l'expression d'attitudes sociales dans une conversation. L'ensemble des comportements générés par notre modèle permettent à un groupe d'agents animés par celui-ci de simuler une conversation, sans tenir compte du contenu verbal. Deux évaluations du modèle ont été conduites, l'une sur Internet et l'autre dans un environnement de réalité virtuelle, afin de vérifier que les attitudes étaient bien reconnuesEmbodied Conversational Agents are virtual characters which main purpose is to interact with a human user. They are used in various domains such as personal assistance, social training or video games for instance. In order to improve their capabilities, it is possible to give them the ability to produce human-like behaviors. The users, even if they are aware that they interact with a machine, are still capable of analyzing and identifying social behaviors through the signals produced by these virtual characters. The research in Embodied Conversational Agents has focused for a long time on the reproduction and recognition of emotions by virtual characters and now the focus is on the ability to express different social attitudes. These attitudes show a behavioral style and are expressed through different modalities of the body, like the facial expressions, the gestures or the gazes for instance. We proposed a model that allows an agent to produce different nonverbal behaviors expressing different social attitudes in a conversation. The whole set of behaviors produced by our model allows a goup of agents animated by it to simulate a conversation, without any verbal content. Two evaluations of the model were conducted, one on the Internet and one in a Virtual Reality environment, to verify that the attitudes produced are well recognized
46
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.
47
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/.
Анотація:
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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Wargnier, Pierre. "Technologies d'humains virtuels dans le soin aux personnes âgées atteintes de troubles cognitifs : les expériences LOUISE et Virtual Promenade." Thesis, Paris Sciences et Lettres (ComUE), 2016. http://www.theses.fr/2016PSLEM021/document.
Анотація:
Les travaux présentés dans ce manuscrit portent sur l'utilisation des humains virtuels et, plus globalement, des technologies du jeu vidéo pour améliorer le soin aux personnes âgées atteintes de troubles cognitifs. Nos travaux s'articulent autour de deux cas d'utilisation des humains virtuels : comme non-soi et comme soi. Plus spécifiquement, nous avons conçu, implémenté et évalué un agent conversationnel animé, appelé LOUISE (LOvely User Interface for Servicing Elders), ayant pour but de servir d'interface utilisateur accessible dans les dipositifs de compensation cognitives à destination des personnes âgées attenteintes de troubles cognitifs, et un dispositif de thérapie psychologique par la réalité virtuelle pour traiter les conséquences des chutes, appelé Promenade virtuelle. Ces deux projets ont été menés suivant des principes de conception participative en living lab, implicant plusieurs parties prenantes dans le processus de conception (patients, aidants et professionnels de santé)The work presented in this manuscript investigates the use of virtual huamans, and, more broadly, of video game technologies to improve the care of older adults with cognitive impairment. Our work revolved around two use cases of virtual humans: as non-self and as self. More specifically, we have designed, implemented and evaluated an embodied conversational agent, called LOUISE (LOvely User Interface for Servicing Elders), meant to serve as an accessible user interface in cognitive compensation systems for older adults with cognitive impairment, and a system for virtual reality-based psychological therapy addressing the consequences of falls, called Virtual Promenade. These two projects have been conducted according to the principles of living lab participatory design, involving several stakeholders in the design process (patients, caregivers and healthcare professionals)
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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.
Анотація:
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.