Berardina De Carolis

APML, a Markup Language for Believable Behavior Generation

Developing an embodied conversational agent able to exhibit a humanlike behavior while communicating with other virtual or human agents requires enriching the dialogue of the agent with non-verbal information. Our agent, Greta, is defined as two components: a Mind and a Body. Her mind reflects her personality, her social intelligence, as well as her emotional reaction to events occurring in the environment. Her body corresponds to her physical appearance able to display expressive behaviors. We designed a Mind—Body interface that takes as input a specification of a discourse plan in an XML language (DPML) and enriches this plan with the communicative meanings that have to be attached to it, by producing an input to the Body in a new XML language (APML). Moreover we have developed a language to describe facial expressions. It combines basic facial expressions with operators to create complex facial expressions. The purpose of this chapter is to describe these languages and to illustrate our approach to the generation of behavior of an agent able to act consistently with her goals and with the context of the interaction.

Embodied contextual agent in information delivering application

We aim at building a new human-computer interface for Information Delivering applications: the conversational agent that we have developed is a multimodal believable agent able to converse with the User by exhibiting a synchronized and coherent verbal and nonverbal behavior. The agent is provided with a personality and a social role, that allows her to show her emotion or to refrain from showing it, depending on the context in which the conversation takes place. The agent is provided with a face and a mind. The mind is designed according to a BDI structure that depends on the agents personality; it evolves dynamically during the conversation, according to the Users dialog moves and to emotions triggered as a consequence of the Interlocutors move; such cognitive features are then translated into facial behaviors. In this paper, we describe the overall architecture of our system and its various components; in particular, we present our dynamic model of emotions. We illustrate our results with an example of dialog all along the paper. We pay particular attention to the generation of verbal and nonverbal behaviors and to the way they are synchronized and combined with each other. We also discuss how these acts are translated into facial expressions.

The dynamic generation of hypertext presentations of medical guidelines

Abstract We describe a project aimed at developing a tool to generate user and context-adapted textual descriptions of clinical guidelines on the World Wide Web. ARIANNA employs two knowledge sources (a decision tree and a taxonomy of concepts in the clinical domain) and schema and ATN-based NLG techniques, to dynamically generate the hypermedia. This appears to the user as a frameset with three main components: the guideline itself, an explanation of related concepts and a justification of individual steps. Each component is adapted to the user: i) the guideline is adapted to the users goal in consulting the system (tutoring vs decision support); ii) explanations of concepts are adapted to the user knowledge and to the interaction history; iii) justifications are reserved for the tutoring consultation mode.

Social robots as mediators between users and smart environments

In this paper we propose the use of a social robot as mediator between the user and a smart environment. Since the speech is considered one of the more natural and immediate input channel in human-robot interaction we discuss the importance of recognizing both the linguistic content of the spoken sentence and the valence of the user tone of voice in order to infer properly the users intent in communication during the interaction.

Generating comparative descriptions of places of interest in the tourism domain

When visiting cities as tourists, most of the times people do not make very detailed plans and, when choosing where to go and what to seem they tend to select the area with the major number of interesting facilities. Therefore, it would be useful to support the user choice with contextual information presentation, information clustering and comparative explanations of places of potential interest in a given area. In this paper we illustrate how MyMap, a mobile recommender system in the Tourism domain, generates comparative descriptions to support users in making decisions about what to see, among relevant objects of interest.

Shallow and Inner Forms of Emotional Intelligence in Advisory Dialog Simulation

A conversational agent aspiring to be believable in an emotional domain should be able to combine its rational and emotional intelligence in a consistent way. We claim that a cognitive model of emotion activation may contribute to this aim by providing knowledge to be employed in modeling emotion regulation and its influence on the dialog dynamics. We show how an XML markup language contributes to insuring independence between the agent’s body and mind, so as to favor adaptation of the dialog to the user characteristics. An example dialog in the eating disorder domain is employed throughout the chapter to illustrate the methods developed and the implemented prototype.

OPADE: optimization of drug prescription using advanced informatics

The computerized drug prescription system (CDPS) is an old, almost obsolete, dream, and numerous researchers have developed prototypes or even full fledged packages. But few systems are currently used in clinical practice. The OPADE project, presented in this paper, aims at developing a computerized system which allows for optimization of drug prescription from a medical, patient compliance and economical point of view; the system will be adapted to different European countries, integrated and customized to local medical practice so as to insure user acceptance.

Interacting with embodied agents in public environments

In this paper, we present the first results of a research aiming at developing an intelligent agent able to interact with users in public spaces through a touch screen or a personal device. The agent communication is adapted to the situation at both content and presentation levels, by generating an appropriate combination of verbal and non-verbal agent behaviours.

Generating User-Adapted Hypermedia from Discourse Plans

This paper describes how hypermedia instruction manuals can be generated from a discourse plan: intentional and rhetorical knowledge in the plan tree are employed to construct the hypermedia elements, to assemble them into pages and to introduce links among them. Plan tree transformation functions are defined so as to ensure that generated hypermedia respect interface usability and Web design criteria. User adaptation is performed by parametrizing these functions: this method enables building the hypermedia according to a dynamic assessment of the user needs.

Social robots and ECAs for accessing smart environments services

As far as interaction is concerned Ambient Intelligence (AmI) research emphasizes the need of natural and friendly interfaces for accessing services provided by the environment. In this paper we present the result of an experimental study aiming at understanding whether Embodied Conversational Agents (ECAs) and Social Robots may improve the naturalness and effectiveness of interaction by playing different roles when acting as interface between users and smart environment services. Results obtained so far show that ECAs seem to have a better evaluation than robots for information related tasks. On the other side, Social Robots are preferred for welcoming people and for guiding them in the smart environment, due to their possibility to move and to the perceived sense of presence. Moreover, the robot seems to elicit a more positive evaluation in terms of user experience.