Conversational agents integrate computational linguistics techniques with the communication channel of the Web to interpret and respond to statements made by users in ordinary natural language. Web-based conversational agents deliver high-volumes of interactive text-based dialogs. Recent years have seen significant activity in enterprise-class conversational agents. This chapter describes the p...

Conversational agents integrate computational linguistics techniques with the communication channel of the Web to interpret and respond to statements made by users in ordinary natural language. Web-based conversational agents deliver high-volumes of interactive text-based dialogs. Recent years have seen significant activity in enterprise-class conversational agents. This chapter describes the p...

Studies of actual conversational behaviours used to generate positive change in family therapy are relatively rare. In this study such conversational details were examined as they occurred in a single session of family therapy. With passages identified by family members as helpful, discursive methods of analysis (conversation analysis and critical discourse analysis) were used to examine an act...

Visual data exploration poses challenges for ’InfoVis Novices’. A ’conversational interface’ which would enable users to generate and interact with visualizations through natural language and gestures, while maintaining a history of the data exploration, has the potential to ameliorate many of these challenges. We performed an exploratory, observational study designed to examine the role of suc...

Two tools for developing embodied conversational agents and deploying them over the world-wide web to standard web browsers are presented. DTask is a hierarchical task decomposition-based dialogue planner, based on the CEA-2018 task description language standard. LiteBody is an extensible, web-based BML renderer that runs in most contemporary web browsers with no additional software and provide...

Conversational modeling requires an extended time commitment, and the difficulty associated with capturing the wide range of conversational stimuli necessitates extended user participation. We propose the use of leaderboards, narratives and deadlines as motivation strategies to persuade user participation in the conversational modeling for virtual humans. We evaluate the applicability of leader...

This report surveys the role of humor in human-to-human interaction and the possible role of humor in human-computer interaction. The aim is to see whether it is useful for embodied conversational agents to integrate humor capabilities in their internal model of intelligence, emotions and interaction (verbal and nonverbal) capabilities. A current state of the art of research in embodied convers...

In this paper, we present a technique for developing user simulators which are able to interact and evaluate conversational agents. Our technique is based on a statistical model that is automatically learned from a dialog corpus. This model is used by the user simulator to provide the following answer taking into account the complete history of the interaction. The main objective of our proposa...

The present study was conducted to investigate if and how conversational agent can facilitate explanation activity that is conducive to learning. This was investigated through two experiments where pairs of participants, who were enrolled in a psychology course, engaged in a task of explaining to their partners the meanings of concepts of technical terms taught in the course. During the task, t...

The present study investigates how a conversational agent can facilitate explanation activity. An experiment was conducted where pairs of participants, who were enrolled in a psychology course, engaged in a task of explaining to their partners the meanings of concepts of technical terms taught in the course. During the task, they interacted with a conversational agent, which was programmed to p...