In this paper, we present a technique for developing user simulators which are able to interact and evaluate conversational agents. Our technique is based on a statistical model that is automatically learned from a dialog corpus. This model is used by the user simulator to provide the following answer taking into account the complete history of the interaction. The main objective of our proposa...

The present study was conducted to investigate if and how conversational agent can facilitate explanation activity that is conducive to learning. This was investigated through two experiments where pairs of participants, who were enrolled in a psychology course, engaged in a task of explaining to their partners the meanings of concepts of technical terms taught in the course. During the task, t...

The present study investigates how a conversational agent can facilitate explanation activity. An experiment was conducted where pairs of participants, who were enrolled in a psychology course, engaged in a task of explaining to their partners the meanings of concepts of technical terms taught in the course. During the task, they interacted with a conversational agent, which was programmed to p...

In recent years there has been an increasing interest concerning the integration of speech and other communication media in conversational systems, originating the so-called multimodal conversational systems. When several interaction modalities are available, users can receive more feedback from a conversational system and it can also receive more information from users, leading to a reduction ...

Non-verbal behavior is an integral part of conversational dialog. When people engage in dialogue they utilize non-verbal behavior both to structure the flow of the conversation as well as to provide feedback about their current understanding of the discourse while the other one is speaking. In this article, we investigate the function of non-verbal behavior and show how it is integrated into a ...

On the semantic level, epistemic modal operators encode modal force (necessity or possibility) and get interpreted against a conversational background which is a function from possible worlds into sets of propositions. In the case of epistemic modality, the conversational background is given by the speaker’s beliefs or the available evidence. Necessity in a given world encodes truth in all alte...

The purpose of this study was to describe preschoolers' conversational responsiveness in an integrated classroom setting. Variables of primary interest were the types of responses as a function of the conversational partner. The children were categorized according to language ability: normally developing, marginal (children previously diagnosed as language or speech impaired, but now functionin...

The context resolution (CR) component of a conversational dialogue system is responsible for interpreting a user’s utterance in the context of previously spoken user utterances, spatial and temporal context, inference, and shared world knowledge. This paper describes a new and independent CR server for the GALAXY conversational system framework. Among the functionality provided by the CR server...