This chapter discusses the changed nature of literacy within new communication contexts, the literacy that is needed for reading, viewing, responding to and producing multimodal and digital texts. Potentials for redesigning literacy pedagogy within new modes of communication are demonstrated for educational contexts. As a basis for this discussion, the author analyses classroom evidence using e...

We developed a dialogue-based tutoring system for teaching English to Japanese students and plan to transfer the current software tutoring agent into an embodied robot in the hope that the robot will enrich conversation by allowing more natural interactions in small group learning situations. To enable smooth communication between an intelligent agent and the user, the agent must have realistic...

The purpose of this paper is to describe the way to represent the skills in dementia care based on the multimodal communication analysis by a computational approach. With the rapid growth of an aging population, it is becoming extremely important to elucidate communication skills for improving the quality of life of the elderly. Focusing on the dementia care method by HUMANITUDE, we have analyz...

In this paper, we present a multimodal discourse ontology that serves as a knowledge representation and annotation framework for the discourse understanding component of an artificial personal office assistant. The ontology models components of natural language, multimodal communication, multi-party dialogue structure, meeting structure, and the physical and temporal aspects of human communicat...

This paper reports on work related to the modelling of Human-Robot Communication on the basis of multimodal and multisensory human behaviour analysis. A primary focus in this framework of analysis is the definition of semantics of human actions in interaction, their capture and their representation in terms of behavioural patterns that, in turn, feed a multimodal human-robot communication syste...

In this paper we present a 3D animated agent with synthesized face, speech and behavior, which is capable of automatic motion generation with a little user support of text annotation. Users without artistic skills are also capable of easy creation and extension of their own agents with tailor-made appearance and motion. Its implementation and compact size allows for easy use on the Internet as ...

When interacting with students, teachers usually combine several communication modalities (speech, hand gestures, gaze, posture, facial expression, graphics on a blackboard, slides...) and have to adapt their communication to the lecture settings (computer knowledge of the students, duration of the lecture...). Although educational resources and intelligent tutoring systems are developing, they...