• Science of Emotion and Sensibility
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• v.16 no.3
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• pp.281-292
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• 2013

The purpose of this study was to identify the effect of gesture and facial expression on persona effects. Fifty-six college students were recruited for this study, and non-verbal communication skills were applied to a pedagogical agent with gesture (conversational vs. deictic) and facial expression. The conversational gesture may have relationship with social interaction hypothesis of pedagogical agent while the deictic gesture may have relationship with attentional guidance hypothesis. The facial expression can be assumed to facilitate the social interaction between the pedagogical agent and learners. Interestingly, the conversational gesture group showed a tendency of outperforming the deictic gesture group. It may imply that the social interaction theory has a strong impact on cognitive support as well as social interaction for learners. There was a significant interaction effect on the engagement when both of facial expression and conversational gesture were applied. This result has two implications. First, facial expression can facilitate the persona effect for engagement.

• Journal of Korea Multimedia Society
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• v.23 no.10
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• pp.1296-1306
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• 2020

Childhood verbal communication impacts children's language skills and has a positive effect as partners use more vocabulary. But reduction in family time, caused by lowered age for private education and so on, has reduced the chance for children to speak with partners who have a proficient language skill. This vacancy was naturally occupied by the media, which has become one of the cornerstones of the growth of kids' contents. Kids contents are making various attempts to expand the breadth of services. But most contents still focus on unilateral visual information delivery yet, so there is a limit to satisfy the vacancy of conversation partners. Therefore this paper suggests an ECA(Embodied conversational agent) to induce children's spoken conversation using a virtual character frequently used in kids contents. This system is implemented by the voice bot and agent model produced using an IBM assistant and Unity. As a result of using ECA for 66 children of 5-9 years old, it showed meaningful results in terms of induction of verbal communication.

• 한국정보컨버전스학회:학술대회논문집
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• 2008.06a
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• pp.53-56
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• 2008

This paper reports on the ACQA(Animated agent for Conversational Question Answering) project conducted at LIMSI. The aim is to design an expressive animated conversational agent(ACA) for conducting research along two main lines: 1/ perceptual experiments(eg perception of expressivity and 3D movements in both audio and visual channels): 2/ design of human-computer interfaces requiring head models at different resolutions and the integration of the talking head in virtual scenes. The target application of this expressive ACA is a real-time question and answer speech based system developed at LIMSI(RITEL). The architecture of the system is based on distributed modules exchanging messages through a network protocol. The main components of the system are: RITEL a question and answer system searching raw text, which is able to produce a text(the answer) and attitudinal information; this attitudinal information is then processed for delivering expressive tags; the text is converted into phoneme, viseme, and prosodic descriptions. Audio speech is generated by the LIMSI selection-concatenation text-to-speech engine. Visual speech is using MPEG4 keypoint-based animation, and is rendered in real-time by Virtual Choreographer (VirChor), a GPU-based 3D engine. Finally, visual and audio speech is played in a 3D audio and visual scene. The project also puts a lot of effort for realistic visual and audio 3D rendering. A new model of phoneme-dependant human radiation patterns is included in the speech synthesis system, so that the ACA can move in the virtual scene with realistic 3D visual and audio rendering.

• Journal of the Korea Convergence Society
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• v.13 no.3
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• pp.11-22
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• 2022

Recently, research and development using various Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies are being conducted in the field of education. Among the AI in Education (AIEd), conversational agents are not limited by time and space, and can learn more effectively by combining them with various AI technologies such as voice recognition and translation. This paper conducted a trend analysis on platforms that have a large number of users and used conversational agents for English learning among commercialized application. Currently commercialized educational platforms using conversational agent through trend analysis has several limitations and problems. To analyze specific problems and limitations, a comparative experiment was conducted with the latest pre-trained large-capacity dialogue model. Sensibleness and Specificity Average (SSA) human evaluation was conducted to evaluate conversational human-likeness. Based on the experiment, this paper propose the need for trained with large-capacity parameters dialogue models, educational data, and information retrieval functions for effective English conversation learning.

• Korean Journal of Cognitive Science
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• v.13 no.4
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• pp.1-8
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• 2002

As Internet grows, many web sites have been built, therefore much information has been registered. Because the web sites have more information, it is more difficult that the user can find the information wanted. Therefore, to get information that user wants easily, the full-text engine may be embedded to the web site. This paper is about developing the help conversational agent for a user to find the information that he wants through conversation with agent. The proposed method is based on the pattern matching of artificial intelligence, not natural language processing. If a user inputs any sentence, the help conversational agent responds to the sentence through preprocessing and pattern matching with knowledge. The knowledge is built with the XML format. With the approximate pattern matching, the agent picks up the appropriate response with some degree of similarities. At the experiment, some different sentences with the same meaning have been entered, then the agent recognized them as the same pattern, and it made a correct answer.

• Korean Journal of Cognitive Science
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• v.16 no.4
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• pp.351-368
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• 2005

The manual construction of the knowledge-base takes much time and effort, and it is hard to adjust intelligence systems to dynamic and flexible environment. Thus mental development in those systems has been investigated in recent years. Autonomous mental development is a new paradigm for developing autonomous machines, which are adaptive and flexible to the environment. Learning conversation, a kind of mental development, is an important aspect of conversational agents. In this paper, we propose a learning conversation method for conversational agents which uses several promising techniques; speech-act templates and genetic programming. Knowledge acquisition of conversational agents is implemented by finite state machines and templates, and dynamic sentence generation is implemented by genetic programming Several illustrations and usability tests how the usefulness of the proposed method.

• Korean Journal of Cognitive Science
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• v.15 no.3
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• pp.35-44
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• 2004

As the use of internet becomes proliferated, a great amount of information is provided through diverse channels. Users require effective information providing service and we have studied the conversational agent that exchanges information between users and agents using natural language dialogue. In this paper, we develop a question answering agent providing the corresponding answer by analyzing the user's intention using artificial intelligence techniques such as pattern matching and Bayesian network We work out various problems in knowledge representation of users by constructing keyword synonym database. The proposed method is applied to designing an agent for the introduction of a fashion web site, which confirms that it responds more flexibly to the user's queries.

• The Journal of the Convergence on Culture Technology
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• v.7 no.1
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• pp.620-631
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• 2021

The study aim to test the effect of voice agent's preceding utterance type on the user experience in the smart home contexts by conversation types. Based on two types of conversation (task-oriented vs. relationship-oriented conversations) and two types of utterance (preceding vs. response utterances), four different scenarios were designed for experimental study. A total of 62 participants were divided into two groups by utterance type, and exposed to two scenarios of the conversation types. Likeability, psychological reactance, and perceived intelligence were measured for the user experience of conversational agent. The result showed main effects of likeability in task-oriented conversations, and of psychological reactance in preceding utterances. The interaction effect demonstrated that preceding conversation improved the likeabilitty and perceived intelligence in the task-oriented conversations.

• Science of Emotion and Sensibility
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• v.21 no.1
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• pp.59-70
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• 2018

With the breakthrough of speech recognition technology, conversational agents have become pervasive through smartphones and smart speakers. The recognition accuracy of speech recognition technology has developed to the level of human beings, but it still shows limitations on understanding the underlying meaning or intention of words, or understanding long conversation. Accordingly, the users experience various errors when interacting with the conversational agents, which may negatively affect the user experience. In addition, in the case of smart speakers with a voice as the main interface, the lack of feedback on system and transparency was reported as the main issue when the users using. Therefore, there is a strong need for research on how users can better understand the capability of the conversational agents and mitigate negative emotions in error situations. In this study, we applied social strategies, "forewarning" and "apology", to conversational agent and investigated how these strategies affect users' perceptions of the agent in breakdown situations. For the study, we created a series of demo videos of a user interacting with a conversational agent. After watching the demo videos, the participants were asked to evaluate how they liked and trusted the agent through an online survey. A total of 104 respondents were analyzed and found to be contrary to our expectation based on the literature study. The result showed that forewarning gave a negative impression to the user, especially the reliability of the agent. Also, apology in a breakdown situation did not affect the users' perceptions. In the following in-depth interviews, participants explained that they perceived the smart speaker as a machine rather than a human-like object, and for this reason, the social strategies did not work. These results show that the social strategies should be applied according to the perceptions that user has toward agents.

• Design Convergence Study
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• v.18 no.3
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• pp.71-87
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• 2019

Previous research has shown that the use of self-disclosure, the process of revealing personal thoughts and feelings, in conversational agents (CAs) increases overall user evaluations. However, research exploring the effects of self-disclosure in different situations or dialogue types is limited. This study investigated the effects of self-disclosure and dialogue type (task- vs. social-oriented) on trust, usefulness, and usage intention. Results showed significant interaction effects between self-disclosure and dialogue type. For CAs that did not use self-disclosure, trust, usefulness, and usage intention were higher in task-oriented dialogues. In contrast, CAs that did use self-disclosure had higher trust, usefulness, and usage intention in social-oriented dialogues. These results suggest that researchers and designers should consider the specific dialogue types and corresponding user goals when adding human qualities, such as self-disclosure, to CAs.