End-to-end evaluations of more conversational dialogue systems with naive users have uncovered severe usability problems that, among other things, result in low task completion rates. First analyses suggest that these problems are related to the system’s dialogue management and turn-taking behavior. This paper starts with a presentation of experimental results, which shed some light on the effe...

The determinants of conversational dominance are not well understood. We used videotaped triadic interactions among unacquainted same-sex American college students to test predictions drawn from the theoretical distinction between dominance and prestige as modes of human status competition. Specifically, we investigated the effects of physical formidability, facial attractiveness, social status...

This paper extends the minimum Bayes-risk framework to incorporate a loss function specific to the task and the ASR system. The errors are modeled as a noisy channel and the parameters are learned from the data. The resulting loss function is used in the risk criterion for decoding. Experiments on a large vocabulary conversational speech recognition system demonstrate significant gains of about...

In this paper, we propose a script language for embodied conversational agents that can function as personal conversational media in asynchronous community systems. Despite the fact that the community interaction is a social event, current online community systems are designed to focus mainly on information exchange through texts, and provide very little support for establishing and maintaining...

This study extended the research on the scaffolding provided by mothers while reading picture books with their children from a focus on conversational styles related to labeling to a focus on those related to agents and actions to clarify the process by which language develops from the one-word to the syntactic stage. We clarified whether mothers decreased the degree of scaffolding in their ini...

The conversational agent understands and provides users with proper information based on natural language. Conventional agents based on pattern matching have many restrictions to manage various types of real dialogues and to improve the answering performance. For the effective construction of conversational agents, we propose a domain-adaptive conversational agent that infers the user’s intenti...

Conversational case-based reasoning (CBR) systems, which incrementally extract a query description through a user-directed conversation , are advertised for their ease of use. However, designing large case libraries that have good performance (i.e., precision and querying ee-ciency) is diicult. CBR vendors provide guidelines for designing these libraries manually, but the guidelines are diicult...

This paper introduces a Vietnamese text-based conversational agent architecture on specific knowledge domain which is integrated in a question answering system. When the question answering system fails to provide answers to users’ input, our conversational agent can step in to interact with users to provide answers to users. Experimental results are promising where our Vietnamese text-based con...

In this paper we present a framework for conversational awareness and conflict resolution in spoken dialogue systems for home care assistance. Conversational awareness is supported through OWL ontologies for capturing conversational modalities, while interpretation and incremental context enrichment is facilitated through Description Logics reasoning. Conflict resolution further assists the int...

In Voice over IP, the quality of interactive conversation is important to users. Major factors affecting perceived quality are delay, delay jitter, and missing packets. For conversational VoIP, a conversational delay also plays an important role for perceived quality. Large conversational delay can result in double talk, echo or even the termination of the conversation. In practice, a playout b...