Virtual humans, with realistic behaviors and increasingly humanlike social skills, evoke in users a range of social behaviors normally only seen in human face-to-face interactions. One of the key challenges in creating such virtual humans is giving them human-like conversational skills. Traditional conversational virtual humans usually make turn-taking decisions depending on explicit cues, such...

Educators in medicine, psychology, and the military want to provide their students with interpersonal skills practice. Virtual humans offer structured learning of interview skills, can facilitate learning about unusual conditions, and are always available. However, the creation of virtual humans with the ability to understand and respond to natural language requires costly engineering by conver...

OBJECTIVE To determine effectiveness of communication training for partners of people with severe traumatic brain injury. DESIGN Three arm non-randomized controlled trial comparing communication partner training (JOINT) with individual treatment (TBI SOLO) and a waitlist control group with 6 month follow-up. PARTICIPANTS Forty-four outpatients with severe chronic traumatic brain injuries we...

Animated agents are cartoon-style characters that facilitate the learning process. We take an animated agent approach to improve English conversation skills of Japanese students. In particular, we use animated agents as conversational partners in interactive role-playing environments (theater, drama, and games). In order to engage the language student, animated agents feature believability-enha...

We summarize an exploratory investigation into using an autonomous conversational agent for improving the communication skills of teenagers with autism. The system conducts a natural conversation with the user and gives real-time and post-session feedback on the user’s nonverbal behavior. We obtained promising results and ideas for improvements in preliminary experiments with five autism spectr...

This paper investigates the use of conversational agents to scaffold on-line collaborative learning discussions through an approach called Academically Productive Talk (APT). In contrast to past work on dynamic support for collaborative learning, which has involved using agents to elevate the conceptual depth of collaborative discussion by leading students in groups through directed lines of re...

Using face-to-face conversation as an interface metaphor, an embodied conversational agent is likely to be easier to use and learn than traditional graphical user interfaces. To make a believable agent that to some extent has the same social and conversational skills as humans do, the embodied conversational agent system must be able to deal with input of the user from different communication m...

BACKGROUND Particularly at the beginning of their studies, international medical students face a number of language-related, social and intercultural challenges. Thus, they perform poorer than their local counterparts in written and oral examinations as well as in Objective Structured Clinical Examinations (OSCEs) in the fields of internal medicine and surgery. It is still unknown how internati...