This report compared production of infinitival object complements during conversational language sampling to production on an elicitation task. Subjects included 25 children between the ages of 3;7 and 5;4. The children produced more two-noun infinitives and produced infinitives with more main verbs on the elicitation task. In the conversational samples, the children produced infinitives almost...

This paper describes two systems using embodied conversational agents (ECAs) for language learning. The first system, called Ville, is a virtual language teacher for vocabulary and pronunciation training. The second system, a dialogue system called DEAL, is a role-playing game for practicing conversational skills. Whereas DEAL acts as a conversational partner with the objective of creating and ...

Conversational agents are exploding in popularity. However, much work remains in the area of non goal-oriented conversations, despite significant growth in research interest over recent years. To advance the state of the art in conversational AI, Amazon launched the Alexa Prize, a 2.5-million dollar university competition where sixteen selected university teams built conversational agents to de...

Knowledge management systems will presumably benefit from intelligent interfaces, including those with animated conversational agents. One of the functions of an animated conversational agent is to serve as a navigational guide that nudges the user how to use the interface in a productive way. This is a different function from delivering the content of the material. We conducted a study on coll...

Recent neural models of dialogue generation offer great promise for generating responses for conversational agents, but tend to be shortsighted, predicting utterances one at a time while ignoring their influence on future outcomes. Modeling the future direction of a dialogue is crucial to generating coherent, interesting dialogues, a need which led traditional NLP models of dialogue to draw on ...

Conversational Informatics. Edited by Toyoaki Nishida c © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd This is a Book Title Name of the Author/Editor c © XXXX John Wiley & Sons, Ltd 2 WHY EMOTIONS SHOULD BE INTEGRATED INTO CONVERSATIONAL AGENTS When building conversational agents that are to take part in social interaction with humans, an important question is whether psychological concepts like emotions or per...

This article studies the function of Copular Predicate Constructions in everyday English conversation. We compare predicate adjective constructions (PA) and with a nominal containing an (PAN). ask whether attributive or presence noun PAN leads to difference two constructions. propose that most cases determines construction, leading many parallels usage between PA A comparison (PN), contrast, sh...

This paper examines the effective deployment of conversational agents in virtual worlds from the perspective of researchers/practitioners in cognitive psychology, computing science, learning technologies and engineering. From a cognitive perspective, the major challenge lies in the coordination and management of the various channels of information associated with conversation/ communication and...

This paper presents the first large-scale analysis of pronunciation variation in conversational Austrian German. Whereas for the varieties of German spoken in Germany, conversational speech has been given noticeable attention in the fields of linguistics and automatic speech recognition, for conversational Austrian there is a lack in speech resources and tools as well as linguistic and phonetic...

The growing complexity of application-to-application interactions has motivated the development of an architectural model with first-class support for multi-step, stateful message exchanges—i.e., conversations—and a declarative means of specifying conversational protocols. In this paper, we extend this architectural model to encompass UI-enabled devices, thereby enabling it to cover human-to-ap...