People highlight the intended interpretation of their utterances within a larger discourse by a diverse set of nonverbal signals. These signals represent a key challenge for animated conversational agents because they are pervasive, variable, and need to be coordinated judiciously in an effective contribution to conversation. In this paper, we describe a freely-available cross-platform real-tim...

This paper overviews robust architecture and modeling techniques for automatic speech recognition and understanding. The topics include robust acoustic and language modeling for spontaneous speech recognition, unsupervised adaptation of acoustic and language models, robust architecture for spoken dialogue systems, multi-modal speech recognition, and speech understanding. This paper also discuss...

This paper concerns the methodologies currently applied to evaluation of spoken and multi modal dialogue systems. Usability is concerned with the effectiveness, efficiency and satisfaction by which users achieves their goals when using a system. The methods developed and applied by the speech community over the past decade to measure the usability of Spoken Dialogue Systems (SDS) are discussed ...

Integrating task and motion planning is becoming increasingly important due to the recognition that a growing number of robotics applications in navigation, search-and-rescue missions, manipulation, and medicine involve reasoning with both discrete abstractions and continuous motions. The problem poses unique computational challenges: a vast hybrid discrete/continuous space must be searched whi...

In this article, we present ongoing research, EMO, an affective embodied conversational agent platform, aimed at depicting multi-ethnic, multi-modal communication patterns in a credible manner. We employ the methodology of integrating counseling concepts early in the design to effectively target a specific domain. The system is geared to augment solution focused therapy. We present a prototype ...

In the last years we have developed a platform for the realization of embodied (conversational) agents, in a distributed logic programming framework. In this paper we will present an overview of our work, by discussing the requirements that acted as our guidelines for design decisions during development, some of the applications that have served as target demonstrators for developing and testin...

Chat functionality is currently considered an important factor in spoken dialogue systems. In this paper, we explore the architecture of a chat-oriented dialogue system that can continue a long conversation with users and can be used for a long time. To achieve this goal, we propose a method combining various types of response generation modules, such as a statistical model-based module, a rule...

This paper proposes a novel user intention simulation method which is a data-driven approach but able to integrate diverse user discourse knowledge together to simulate various type of users. In Markov logic framework, logistic regression based data-driven user intention modeling is introduced, and human dialog knowledge are designed into two layers such as domain and discourse knowledge, then ...

Dialogue material has been collected using bionic Wizard-of-Oz simulations of an automated voice-driven dialogue system; system turns, using rule-based speech synthesis, were systematically varied for both text and prosody. In a separate pilot experiment, subjects evaluated the system turns on a number of parameters. While they did not always clearly differentiate between the different conditio...

We describe a spoken dialog application framework that combines the power and flexibility of server-side Java Servlets and Java Server Pages (JSPs) with the deployment portability, reliability and scalability of standard web (HTTP) servers and VoiceXML clients. Applications are developed by extending a framework of Java classes in order to define dialogs through lower level actions such as spee...