Current ASR and MT systems do not operate on conversational Finnish, because training data for colloquial Finnish has not been available. Although speech recognition performance on literary Finnish is already quite good, those systems have very poor baseline performance in conversational speech. Text data for relevant vocabulary and language models can be collected from the Internet, but web da...

A conversational agent is an agent that interacts with users using natural language interface. Especially in Internet space, its role has been recently highlighted as a virtual representative of a web site. However, most conversational agents use simple pattern matching techniques for their answer without considering user goals and thus give user an unsatisfactory response. In this paper, we pr...

Conversational approaches to human-computer collaboration have so far mostly been employed for the design of natural language interfaces. We claim, however, that our “conversational interaction model” can also be applied feasibly to graphical and multimodal interactions. The model comprises two interrelated parts: first, the description of local discourse structures and functional interrelation...

Individuals with autism spectrum disorders often exhibit difficulties with reciprocal social conversation, engaging in limited verbal exchanges, even when language structures are intact. This study employed a multiple baseline design to examine the effectiveness of a self-management intervention targeting (1) on-topic responsiveness to a conversational partner; (2) expansion of the conversation...

Virtual worlds and massively multi-player online games are rich sources of information about large-scale teams and groups, offering the tantalizing possibility of harvesting data about group formation, social networks, and network evolution. However these environments lack many of the cues that facilitate natural language processing in other conversational settings and different types of social...

The goal of dialogue practice for a second language learner is to facilitate their production of dialogue similar to that between native speakers. This paper explores the characteristics of student and tutor dialogue in terms of their differences from classic conversational and task-oriented corpora. Interlocutors have the tendency to align to the language of the other in conversational dialogu...

Embodied Conversational Agent (ECA) is the user interface metaphor that allows to naturally communicate information during human-computer interaction in synergic modality dimensions, including voice, gesture, emotion, text, etc. Due to its anthropological representation and the ability to express human-like behavior, ECAs are becoming popular interface front-ends for dialog and conversational a...

This paper describes our efforts towards utilizing multilingual spoken dialogue systems as an aid to second language acquisition. We argue that it is important for language students to have the opportunity to practice communication in a non-threatening environment, something that a computer can naturally provide. We envision a three-stage interaction focused around a specific topic of a lesson ...

Given the value of face-to-face interaction in communication and learning, our persistent goal has been to develop, evaluate, and apply animated agents to produce realistic and accurate speech. We have implemented these agents as computer-assisted speech and language tutors for hard of hearing and autistic children, and other children with language challenges. Our languagetraining program utili...