Related papers: Arthur: a new ECA that uses Memory to improve Comm…
Textual conversational agent or chatbots' development gather tremendous traction from both academia and industries in recent years. Nowadays, chatbots are widely used as an agent to communicate with a human in some services such as booking…
Personal assistant systems, such as Apple Siri, Google Assistant, Amazon Alexa, and Microsoft Cortana, are becoming ever more widely used. Understanding user intent such as clarification questions, potential answers and user feedback in…
Empathetic response generation aims to comprehend the cognitive and emotional states in dialogue utterances and generate proper responses. Psychological theories posit that comprehending emotional and cognitive states necessitates…
Chatbots are conversational software applications designed to interact dialectically with users for a plethora of different purposes. Surprisingly, these colloquial agents have only recently been coupled with computational models of…
Human memory prioritizes the storage and recall of information that is emotionally-arousing and/or important in a process known as value-directed memory. When experiencing a stream of information (e.g. conversation, book, lecture, etc.),…
We present a new framework called KorraAI for conceiving and building embodied conversational agents (ECAs). Our framework models ECAs' behavior considering contextual information, for example, about environment and interaction time, and…
While end-to-end neural conversation models have led to promising advances in reducing hand-crafted features and errors induced by the traditional complex system architecture, they typically require an enormous amount of data due to the…
Humans use language to collectively execute abstract strategies besides using it as a referential tool for identifying physical entities. Recently, multiple attempts at replicating the process of emergence of language in artificial agents…
The ability to cooperate through language is a defining feature of humans. As the perceptual, motory and planning capabilities of deep artificial networks increase, researchers are studying whether they also can develop a shared language to…
Little research has explored the communication needs of autistic adults. Augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) can support these communication needs, but more guidance is needed on how to design AAC systems to support this…
Recently, large language models have facilitated the emergence of highly intelligent conversational AI capable of engaging in human-like dialogues. However, a notable distinction lies in the fact that these AI models predominantly generate…
Arguably, the visual perception of conversational agents to the physical world is a key way for them to exhibit the human-like intelligence. Image-grounded conversation is thus proposed to address this challenge. Existing works focus on…
This paper describes our research on AI agents embodied in visual, virtual or physical forms, enabling them to interact with both users and their environments. These agents, which include virtual avatars, wearable devices, and robots, are…
The study proposes and tests a technique for automated emotion recognition through mouth detection via Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN), meant to be applied for supporting people with health disorders with communication skills issues…
Despite advances in language and speech technologies, no open-source system enables full speech-to-speech, multi-turn dialogue with integrated tool use and agentic reasoning. We introduce AURA (Agent for Understanding, Reasoning, and…
There have been several attempts to define a plausible motivation for a chit-chat dialogue agent that can lead to engaging conversations. In this work, we explore a new direction where the agent specifically focuses on discovering…
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,…
Artificial companion agents are defined as hardware or software entities designed to provide companionship to a person. The senior population are facing a special demand for companionship. Artificial companion agents have been demonstrated…
Group conversations are valuable for second language (L2) learners as they provide opportunities to practice listening and speaking, exercise complex turn-taking skills, and experience group social dynamics in a target language. However,…
Artificial agents, particularly humanoid robots, interact with their environment, objects, and people using cameras, actuators, and physical presence. Their communication methods are often pre-programmed, limiting their actions and…