Some Pitfalls for Developing Enculturated Conversational Agents

Social Practice: Becoming Enculturated in Human-Computer Interaction

We present a new approach to the design, development and evaluation of embodied conversational agents (ECAs) that allows them to index identity through culturally and socially authentic verbal and non-verbal behaviors. This approach is illustrated with research we are carrying out with children who speak several dialects of American English, and the subsequent implementation and first evaluatio...

Josep Call

For centuries humans have been looking for the key element that transformed non-human into human minds. Divine intervention, language, and more recently enculturation have been some of the candidates proposed for enacting such a change. Ten years ago I could have subscribed one of the thesis of this paper: “Enculturated great apes might transform the typically astute primate behavior-reading in...

Supporting Learner Social Relationships with Enculturated Pedagogical Agents

Adaptive Agents for Promoting Intercultural Skills

Pedagogic conversational agents can be effective in promoting the acquisition of language and intercultural skills, both as virtual coaches and virtual conversational partners. This paper gives an overview of a framework for utilizing conversational agents to promote acquisition of intercultural communication skills. Adaptation plays an important and increasing role, in creating courses that ar...

DTask and LiteBody: Open Source, Standards-Based Tools for Building Web-Deployed Embodied Conversational Agents

Two tools for developing embodied conversational agents and deploying them over the world-wide web to standard web browsers are presented. DTask is a hierarchical task decomposition-based dialogue planner, based on the CEA-2018 task description language standard. LiteBody is an extensible, web-based BML renderer that runs in most contemporary web browsers with no additional software and provide...