People engage in small talk and conversational storytelling to provide information in engaging ways and to serve interpersonal goals such as building rapport and credibility. Embodied conversational interface agents, that represent the computer in its interaction with human users by way of a graphical humanoid body on a screen, can also profitably engage in these behaviors. We describe the ongo...

Embodied conversational agents are virtual characters that engage users in conversation with appropriate speech, gesture, and facial expression. The high cost of developing embodied conversational agents has led to a recent increase in open source agent platforms. In this paper, we present XNAgent, an open source platform for embodied conversational agents based on the XNA Framework. By leverag...

Abstract English education for college students is a major instructional programme with significant developmental importance; yet, its conversations are also crucial. Reflexivity in conversational repair refers to the tendency of speakers go back beginning repairing component rather than implement directly after wrong word. In order help listeners solve connection problem, use different back-re...

We detail the design, development and evaluation of Augmentative and Alternative Communication (AAC) software which encourages rapid conversational interaction. The system uses Natural Language Generation (NLG) technology to automatically generate conversational utterances from a domain knowledge base modelled from content suggested by a small AAC user group. Findings from this work are present...