In the future, home-care management will probably involve intelligent conversational assistants, which support patients at home through natural language interfaces. These conversational assistants should support sophisticated grammar formalisms enriched with non-trivial syntactic and semantics representations, in order to provide an effective human-computer interaction by means of language unde...

Work on both the graphical user interface (GUI) and the conversational user interface (CUI) started at about the same time, about 40 years ago. The GUI was a lot easier to implement, and it made computing and information resources available to ordinary people—but over the years it has lost much of its simplicity and charm. The CUI has taken many more years to develop, requiring major scientific...

Language modeling for large-vocabulary conversational Arabic speech recognition is faced with the problem of the complex morphology of Arabic, which increases the perplexity and out-of-vocabulary rate. This problem is compounded by the enormous dialectal variability and differences between spoken and written language. In this paper we investigate improvements in Arabic language modeling by deve...

This study reports the results of a laboratory experiment exploring interactions between humans and a conversational agent. Using the ChatScript language, we created a chat bot that asked participants to describe a series of images. The two objectives of this study were (1) to analyze the impact of dynamic responses on participants’ perceptions of the conversational agent, and (2) to explore be...

Cobot is a new intelligent agent platform that connects users through real-time and off-line conversations about their health and medical issues. Intelligent web based information agents (conversational/community bots) participate in each conversation providing highly-relevant real-time informational recommendations and connecting people with relevant conversations and other community members. ...

The design of robust new interfaces that process conversational speech is a challenging research direction largely because users’ spoken language is so variable, which is especially true of children. The present research explored whether children’s response latencies before initiating a conversational turn converge with those heard in the text-to-speech (TTS) of a computer partner. A study was ...

Even when the role of a conversational agent is well known users persist in confronting them with Out-of-Domain input. This often results in inappropriate feedback, leaving the user unsatisfied. In this paper we explore the automatic creation/enrichment of conversational agents’ knowledge bases by taking advantage of natural language interactions present in the Web, such as movies subtitles. Th...

This work investigates the task of porting a broadcast news recognition system to a conversational speech domain, for which only untranscribed acoustic data are available. An iterative adaptation procedure is proposed that alternatively generates automatic speech transcriptions and performs acoustic and language model adaptation. The procedure was applied on a tourist-information conversational...

This paper presents an approach to creating intelligent conversational agents that are capable of returning appropriate responses to natural language input. Our approach consists of using a supervised learning algorithm in combination with different NLP algorithms in training the system to identify paraphrases of the user’s question stored in a database. When tested on a data set consisting of ...

The purpose of the two experiments reported here was to investigate whether bilingualism confers an advantage on children's conversational understanding. A total of 163 children aged 3-6 years were given a Conversational Violations Test to determine their ability to identify responses to questions as violations of Gricean maxims of conversation (to be informative and avoid redundancy, speak the...