Abstract not found

Abstract not found

We report on a study examining the generation of noun phrases within a spoken dialog agent for a navigation domain. The task is to provide real-time instructions that direct the user to move between a series of destinations within a large interior space. A subtask within sentence planning is determining what form to choose for noun phrases. This choice is driven by both the discourse history and spatial context features derived from the directionfollower’s position, e.g. his view angle, distance from the target referent and the number of similar items in view. The algorithm was developed as a decision tree and its output was evaluated by a group of human judges who rated 62.6 % of the expressions generated by the system to be as good as or better than the language originally produced by human dialog partners. 1

Multimodal interfaces provide more flexible and compelling interaction and can enable public information kiosks to support more complex tasks for a broader community of users. MATCHKiosk is a multimodal interactive city guide which provides users with the freedom to interact using speech, pen, touch or multimodal inputs. The system responds by generating multimodal presentations that synchronize synthetic speech with a life-like virtual agent and dynamically generated graphics. 1

The functionality of an information kiosk can be extended by allowing it to interact with a smartphone, as demonstrated by the Kimono system, and the user interface can be greatly simplified by “associations ” between pieces of information. A kiosk provides information that is relevant to a particular location and can use valuable context information, such as the fact that a user is physically standing in front of the kiosk, to tailor the display. Its graphically rich screen is suitable for presenting information to the user and has a natural input modality requiring the user to simply touch the screen. However, a kiosk lacks mobility and cannot stay with the user as he or she moves about the environment. Also, information provided by the kiosk must be remembered by the user. Finally, it is difficult to add information to the kiosk, and so the kiosk remains an information display device. All this changes when a handset, such as a PDA or smartphone, can interact with the kiosk. The handset acts like a personalized proxy of the kiosk. It accompanies the user serving as a memory device. It is also an excellent media creation device, capable of taking pictures and recording voice memos as well as short text messages. Associating newly created content with other currently selected content makes for a simpler user interface. Content and its associations can be uploaded to a kiosk allowing others to access to it.

Abstract. Embodied Conversational Agents (ECAs) are computer generated life-like characters that interact with human users in face-to-face conversations. To achieve natural multi-modal conversations, ECA systems are sophisticated and require numbers of building assemblies. They are thus difficult for an individual research group to develop. To address this problem, we are developing an approach to connect those components with a Generic ECA (GECA) framework. GECA is composed with a blackboard-model based platform, a high-level protocol and a set of APIs which are meant for easing component wrapper development. As an expectation, with such a generic ECA framework, rapid ECA system prototyping is possible while research result sharing and the collaboration between ECA researchers can be facilitated. This paper describes the basic concepts of this framework, an initial implementation and evaluations of actually using it to build a realistic ECA application.

Abstract not found