In this paper we describe a question interpretation module designed as a part of a Question Answering Dialogue System (QADS) which is used for an interactive quiz application. Question interpretation is achieved in applying a sequence of classification, information extraction, query formalization and query expansion tasks. The process of a question classification is performed based on a domain-...

Intelligent rooms are responsive environments in which human activities are monitored and responses are generated to facilitate these activities. Research and development on intelligent rooms currently focuses on the integration of multiple sensor devices with pre-programmed responses to specific triggers. Developments in intelligent agents towards intrinsically motivated learning agents can be...

Children seem intrinsically motivated to manipulate, to explore, to test, to learn and they look for activities and situations that provide such learning opportunities. Inspired by research in developmental psychology and neuroscience, some researchers have started to address the problem of designing intrinsic motivation systems. A robot controlled by such systems is able to autonomously explor...

The standard reinforcement learning view of the involvement of neuromodulatory systems in instrumental conditioning includes a rather straightforward conception of motivation as prediction of sum future reward. Competition between actions is based on the motivating characteristics of their consequent states in this sense. Substantial, careful, experiments reviewed in Dickinson & Balleine, 12,13...

Deformable models in the “physically-based” paradigm are almost always formulated in an adhoc fashion and are not related to physical reality. We reinterpret these techniques by putting them into a framework of robust statistics and using this framework to analyze the problems and ad-hoc solutions found in common physically-based formulations. These include incorrect prior shape models; bad rel...

Considerable empirical research finds that people derive utility not only from consumption, but also from their beliefs about themselves and the world. Rather than dispassionately updating their views in response to new information, such belief-based utility implies that people at times avoid information and use other strategies to protect their existing beliefs. We present a two-stage model of...

Intrinsic motivation is what causes us to do something “for its own sake,” in contrast to doing something for an external reward. There is great interest in building intrinsic motivation into artificial systems by defining intrinsic reward signals within the reinforcement learning framework. Yet, what intrinsic reward signals are, and how it may differ from extrinsic reward signals, remains a m...

The question of grammar coverage in a treebank is addressed from the perspective of language description, not corpus description. We argue that a treebanking methodology based on parsing a corpus does not necessarily imply worse coverage than grammar induction based on a manually annotated corpus.