Related papers: Multimodal Dialogue Management for Multiparty Inte…
Multi-agent reinforcement learning has been used as an effective means to study emergent communication between agents, yet little focus has been given to continuous acoustic communication. This would be more akin to human language…
Research has shown that human-agent relationships form in similar ways to human-human relationships. Since children do not have the same critical analysis skills as adults (and may over-trust technology, for example), this…
Interactive storytelling is vital for preschooler development. While children's interactive partners have traditionally been their parents and teachers, recent advances in artificial intelligence (AI) have sparked a surge of AI-based…
Historically, researchers have focused on analyzing WEIRD, adult perspectives on technology. This means we may not have technology developed appropriately for children and those from non-WEIRD countries. In this paper, we analyze children…
It may be difficult for some individuals to open up and share their thoughts and feelings in front of a mental health expert. For those who are more at ease with a virtual agent, conversational agents can serve as an intermediate step in…
In task-oriented dialogues with symbiotic robots, the robot usually takes the initiative in dialogue progression and topic selection. In such robot-driven dialogue, the user's sense of participation in the dialogue is reduced because the…
Emotion expressions serve as important communicative signals and are crucial cues in intuitive interactions between humans. Hence, it is essential to include these fundamentals in robotic behavior strategies when interacting with humans to…
Task-specific AI agents are showing remarkable performance across different domains. But modeling generalized AI agents like human intelligence will require more than current datasets or only reward-based environments that don't include…
Many studies have applied reinforcement learning to train a dialog policy and show great promise these years. One common approach is to employ a user simulator to obtain a large number of simulated user experiences for reinforcement…
As minimally verbal autistic (MVA) children communicate with parents through few words and nonverbal cues, parents often struggle to encourage their children to express subtle emotions and needs and to grasp their nuanced signals. We…
We present an architecture for integrating real-time, multimodal input into a computational agent's contextual model. Using a human-avatar interaction in a virtual world, we treat aligned gesture and speech as an ensemble where content may…
Affective tactile interaction constitutes a fundamental component of human communication. In natural human-human encounters, touch is seldom experienced in isolation; rather, it is inherently multisensory. Individuals not only perceive the…
Goal-oriented conversational agents are becoming prevalent in our daily lives. For these systems to engage users and achieve their goals, they need to exhibit appropriate social behavior as well as provide informative replies that guide…
In this paper, we present a methodology for the development of embodied conversational agents for social virtual worlds. The agents provide multimodal communication with their users in which speech interaction is included. Our proposal…
Parenting brings emotional and physical challenges, from balancing work, childcare, and finances to coping with exhaustion and limited personal time. Yet, one in three parents never seek support. AI systems potentially offer stigma-free,…
Large Language Model (LLM)-enhanced agents become increasingly prevalent in Human-AI communication, offering vast potential from entertainment to professional domains. However, current multi-modal dialogue systems overlook the acoustic…
Teaching programming in early childhood (4-9) to enhance computational thinking has gained popularity in the recent movement of computer science for all. However, current practices ignore some fundamental issues resulting from young…
We present some results concerning the dialogue behavior and inferred sentiment of a group of older adults interacting with a computer-based avatar. Our avatar is unique in its ability to hold natural dialogues on a wide range of everyday…
Young people's mental well-being is a global concern, with peer support playing a key role in daily emotional regulation. Conversational agents are increasingly viewed as promising tools for delivering accessible, personalised peer support,…
Visual question answering and visual dialogue tasks have been increasingly studied in the multimodal field towards more practical real-world scenarios. A more challenging task, audio visual scene-aware dialogue (AVSD), is proposed to…