We describe an agent-based model of NL dialog, arguing that, by embedding a cooperation model in an agent architecture, the variability of dialog can be faced and linguistic phenomena can be modeled as general agent behavior. The coherence notion adopted in our model requires that the steps of a dialog contribute to the goals of the interactants; so, each turn is interpreted by matching its und...

In this paper we present our Embodied Conversational Agent (ECA) capable of displaying a vast set of facial expressions to communicate its emotional states as well as its social relations. Our agent is able to superpose and mask its emotional states as well as fake or inhibit them. We defined complex facial expressions as expressions arising from these displays. In the following, we describe a ...

Children’s interactive e-books are novel literacy tools with interactive and multimodal representations of story contents and increased customizable features. The learning opportunities represented by these new affordances demand a thorough consideration of children’s engagement, including the contextual and socio-cultural factors which influence the books’ deployment in home and classroom sett...

9 Humans routinely communicate to coordinate their activities, persisting and elaborating 10 signals to pursue goals that cannot be accomplished individually. Communicative persistence 11 is associated with uniquely human cognitive skills such as intentionality, because interactants 12 modify their communication in response to another’s understanding of their meaning. Here 13 were show that two...

A common tool for improving the performance quality of natural language processing systems is the use of contextual information for disambiguation. Here I describe the use of a finite state machine (FSM) to disambiguate speech acts in a machine translation system. The FSM has two layers that model, respectively, the global and local structures found in naturally-occurring conversations. The FSM...

Humans routinely communicate to coordinate their activities, persisting and elaborating signals to pursue goals that cannot be accomplished individually. Communicative persistence is associated with complex cognitive skills such as intentionality, because interactants modify their communication in response to another's understanding of their meaning. Here we show that two language-trained chimp...

Face-to-face interactions are a crucial part of services. However, research that investigates the dynamics of service encounters is still rare. In this study we used a theoretical framework that aligned the concept of interpersonal complementarity with Mehrabian and Russell’s (1974) three-dimensional model of affect. We hypothesized that there are positive relationships between employees’ and c...

Effective communication between healthcare professionals and patients is critical to patients' health outcomes. The doctor/patient dialogue has been extensively researched from different perspectives, with findings emphasising a range of behaviours that lead to effective communication. Much research involves self-reports, however, so that behavioural engagement cannot be disentangled from patie...

Whereas the cognitive processes and effects of collaborative learning have been intensively studied within the Learning Sciences, little attention has been paid to the way motivational and emotional factors may affect them. In this symposium, we present recent findings from three independent lines of research that focus on the way motivation and affect shape the interaction between peer learner...

The nature of human interaction, particularly within the context of family, is necessarily complex due to the multitude of characteristics which influence the individual's intention toward the other, as well as the characteristics and effects of interaction as a function of the co-construction of meaning between interactants. This essay delineates two arguments, philosophical and pragmatic, whi...