One of the hallmarks of schizophrenia is impairment in social functioning. A large body of research supports the effectiveness of social skills training in integrating the schizophrenic patients into the community. So, we aimed to investigate the effectiveness of a constructed social skills training program on improving social skills among schizophrenic patients. The study was based on a contro...

The purpose of this paper is to present a design of a minimal grounded situation model (GSM) [Mavridis and Roy 2005, Mavridis 2005] which will enable a conversational robot to pass the “Token Test”. The “Token Test” is a standard test designed to assess early situated language skills of children. This specific design is given as an example of a wider methodology. According to this methodology, ...

While end-to-end neural conversation models have led to promising advances in reducing hand-crafted features and errors induced by the traditional complex system architecture, they typically require an enormous amount of data due to the lack of modularity. Previous studies adopted a hybrid approach with knowledge-based components either to abstract out domainspecific information or to augment d...

Recent research has established the potential for computer generated virtual characters to act as virtual patients (VP) for the assessment and training of novice clinicians in interpersonal skills, interviewing, and diagnosis. These VPs are embodied interactive conversational agents who are designed to simulate a particular clinical presentation of a patient’s illness with a high degree of cons...