Related papers: Conversational Agents and Children: Let Children L…

Vast improvements in natural language understanding and speech recognition have paved the way for conversational interaction with computers. While conversational agents have often been used for short goal-oriented dialog, we know little…

Intelligent dialogue systems are increasingly used in modern education and psychological counseling fields, but most existing systems are limited to a single domain, cannot deal with both educational and psychological issues, and often lack…

Intelligent agents such as robots are increasingly deployed in real-world, safety-critical settings. It is vital that these agents are able to explain the reasoning behind their decisions to human counterparts, however, their behavior is…

A goal shared by artificial intelligence and information retrieval is to create an oracle, that is, a machine that can answer our questions, no matter how difficult they are. A more limited, but still instrumental, version of this oracle is…

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…

Building intelligent agents that can communicate with and learn from humans in natural language is of great value. Supervised language learning is limited by the ability of capturing mainly the statistics of training data, and is hardly…

Teachable Agent (TA) is a special type of pedagogical agent which instantiates the educational theory of Learning by Teaching. Soon after its emergence, research of TA becomes an active field, as it can solve the over scaffolded problem in…

To build agents that can collaborate effectively with others, recent research has trained artificial agents to communicate with each other in Lewis-style referential games. However, this often leads to successful but uninterpretable…

Much discussion about large language models and language-and-vision models has focused on whether these models are intelligent agents. We present an alternative perspective. We argue that these artificial intelligence models are cultural…

We develop a general problem setting for training and testing the ability of agents to gather information efficiently. Specifically, we present a collection of tasks in which success requires searching through a partially-observed…

Call centers, in which human operators attend clients using textual chat, are very common in modern e-commerce. Training enough skilled operators who are able to provide good service is a challenge. We suggest an algorithm and a method to…

We present the design of an online social skills development interface for teenagers with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). The interface is intended to enable private conversation practice anywhere, anytime using a web-browser. Users…

Conversational agents have been gaining increasing popularity in recent years. Influenced by the widespread adoption of task-oriented agents such as Apple Siri and Amazon Alexa, these agents are being deployed into various applications to…

Iteratively building and testing machine learning models can help children develop creativity, flexibility, and comfort with machine learning and artificial intelligence. We explore how children use machine teaching interfaces with a team…

To acquire language, children need rich language input. However, many parents find it difficult to provide children with sufficient language input, which risks delaying their language development. To aid these parents, we design Captivate!,…

Heuristics and cognitive biases are an integral part of human decision-making. Automatically detecting a particular cognitive bias could enable intelligent tools to provide better decision-support. Detecting the presence of a cognitive bias…

Training automated agents to complete complex tasks in interactive environments is challenging: reinforcement learning requires careful hand-engineering of reward functions, imitation learning requires specialized infrastructure and access…

We introduce Interactionalism as a new set of guiding principles and heuristics for the design and architecture of learning now available due to Generative AI (GenAI) platforms. Specifically, we articulate interactional intelligence as a…

In this paper we describe the requirements and early system design for a smart conversational agent that can assist older adults in the reminiscence process. The practice of reminiscence has well documented benefits for the mental, social…

Conversational Artificial Intelligence (CAI) systems and Intelligent Personal Assistants (IPA), such as Alexa, Cortana, Google Home and Siri are becoming ubiquitous in our lives, including those of children, the implications of which is…