Janet E. Cahn

Improvising linguistic style: social and affective bases for agent personality

This paper introduces Linguistic Style Improvisation, a theory and set of algorithms for improvisation of spoken utterances by articial agents, with applications to interactive story and dialogue systems. We argue that linguistic style is a key aspect of character, and show how speech act representations common in AI can provide abstract representations from which computer characters can improvise. We show that the mechanisms proposed introduce the possibility of socially oriented agents, meet the requirements that lifelike characters be believable, and satisfy particular criteria for improvisation proposed by Hayes-Roth.

The Effect of Pitch Accenting on Pronoun Referent Resolution

By strictest interpretation, theories of both centering and intonational meaning fail to predict the existence of pitch accented pronominals. Yet they occur felicitously in spoken discourse. To explain this, I emphasize the dual functions served by pitch accents, as markers of both propositional (semantic/pragmatic) and attentional salience. This distinction underlies my proposals about the attentional consequences of pitch accents when applied to pronominals, in particular, that while most pitch accents may weaken or reinforce a cospecifiers status as the center of attention, a contrastively stressed pronominal may force a shift, even when contraindicated by textual features.

Speech research (panel): near and not-so-near results and what they might mean for IUI

Statement of the Panel The purpose of this panel is to provide members of the IUI community with a look at where speech is heading in the near and not so near term. At present speech research has made great strides in speech recognition (to the point that large vocabulary, continuous dictation products are commercially available), some strides in speech understanding for limited tasks, and progress on synthesis (where products have long been available and continue to improve). Because of these