To facilitate lifelike conversations with the human players in interactive dramas, virtual characters should follow similar conversational norms as those that govern human-human conversations. In this paper, we present a model of conversational norms in a decision-theoretic framework. This model is employed in the Thespian interactive drama system. In Thespian, characters have explicit goals of...

We survey deenitions, known results, and open questions in the area of locally random reductions and explore the ramiications of these reductions in complexity theory.

Cooperation and fairness in encounters with strangers are puzzling behaviors, since they contradict the law of natural selection. Compelling evidence shows that direct and indirect reciprocity and altruistic punishment are important mechanisms for the evolution of cooperation in the long-term. For short-interaction, cooperation and fairness are explained by theories which assume that individual...

The new Rebel Agent paradigm is meant to help achieve character believability in various forms of interactive storytelling. Rebel agents may refuse a goal or plan that they assess to be in a conflict with their own dynamic motivation model: we call such conflict situations “motivation discrepancies”. We are currently in the process of implementing a Rebel Agent prototype in eBotworks, a cogniti...

In this book, the authors present an important body of work in computational linguistics, which they and their colleagues have been developing over the past 20 years. For a unifying perspective, they organize their assumptions, theories, and techniques around the theme of ontological semantics. Along the way, they critique many alternative views of semantics, which they distinguish from their o...

Learning to apply software engineering requires practical experience, and can not be taught through traditional theory-based lectures. Interactive learning is an approach that combines lectures and exercises into multiple iterations of theory, example, exercise, solution and reflection. It is based on active, computer based and experiential learning and on immediate feedback to improve the lear...

Interactive structured prediction (ISP) is an emerging framework for structured prediction (SP) where the user and the system collaborate to produce a high quality output. Typically, search algorithms applied to ISP problems have been based on the algorithms for fully-automatic SP systems. However, the decision rule applied should not be considered as optimal since the goal in ISP is to reduce ...

This paper describes an environment for the development of qualitative simulation applications in the context of interactive systems: QPVis. At the heart of QPVis is an implementation of Qualitative Process Theory (QPT) which is designed to be extensible and to allow the definition of new kinds of behaviours / interactions within the world. Another objective was to retain real-time and interact...

Understanding intramolecular energy flow in molecules is one of the central goals of chemical physics. Statistical theories [such as Rice-Ramsperger-Kassel-MarCus (RRKM) theory] of unimolecular reaction rates, which assume that the vibrational degrees of freedom rapidly exchange energy, have proved extremely successful (1). Recent work on small molecules has provided rigorous tests of these the...

OBJECTIVE The primary purpose of this experiment was to gain a greater understanding of the utilization of working memory when interacting with a speech-enabled interactive voice response (IVR) system. BACKGROUND A widely promoted guideline advises limiting IVR menus to five or fewer items because of constraints of the human memory system, commonly citing Miller's (1956) paper. The authors ar...