Employers of engineers seek to have their engineers use active-listening skills. Good active listeners demonstrate skills such as avoiding judgmental responses and giving supportive and appropriate verbal and nonverbal feedback. To support students in developing active-listening skills, we developed teaching modules covering sixteen learning outcomes, to be delivered across a four-year engineering program. These modules have been designed to integrate with the program's core content. Informal pilot testing with seniors in a capstone design course suggests that this curricular approach enables students to understand and to be able to practice introductory active-learning skills.

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This paper explores the use of proxemics and gaze in multimodal multiparty interaction in virtual reality (VR). While many applications with sophisticated implementations have been developed, we sought to create, using more lightweight tools, a multimodal multiparty application in which users had a strong sense of both autonomy and immersion. In conversations with virtual agents, true mixed-initiative interaction is difficult to achieve because initiative can include choice of topic. Our work suggests that using proxemics and gaze can enable multiparty conversations with virtual agents that more closely resemble mixed-initiative interaction.

This demonstration presents "The Market Scene," a virtual-reality scene in which the user interacts with multiple virtual agents and initiates conversations with these agents via proxemics and gaze. The application is implemented in Unity with the VAIF authoring tool for rapid development of social agents. In the Market Scene, the user learns the background of the "Gods of the Neon City" adventure story through interaction in a crowded market rather than by listening to a narrator. The application demonstrates a form of mixed-initiative interaction, in that the user can initiate a conversation by coming near to and gazing at an agent, and an agent can initiate a conversation if a user approaches.

How would humans would try to build rapport with an agent rather than with another human? To address this issue, we created a virtual-reality application, Gods of the Neon City, in which an agent might (or might not) betray its human partner. The results from 45 participants suggest that it is possible to build a VR adventure with agents in which a central character can be perceived as untrustworthy, and that participants' perceptions of an agent's trustworthiness can be affected by systematic messages from other agents. However, the study's data are insufficient to demonstrate that participants try to address perceived untrustworthiness by increasing the length of their utterances.

The Boston Massacre History Experience is a multimodal interactive virtual-reality application aimed at eighth-grade students. In the application, students students have conversations with seven embodied conversational agents, representing characters such as John Adams, a tea-shop owner, and a redcoat. The experience ends with a conversation with Abigail Adams for students to explain what they learned and a narration by John Adams about events that followed. The application is novel technically because it provides a form of user initiative in conversation and features an unprecedented number of virtual agents, some 486 in all.

This paper describes a system for embodied conversational agents developed by Inmerssion and one of the applications—Young Merlin: Trial by Fire —built with this system. In the Merlin application, the ECA and a human interact with speech in virtual reality. The goal of this application is to provide engaging VR experiences that build rapport through storytelling and verbal interactions. The agent is fully automated, and his attitude towards the user changes over time depending on the interaction. The conversational system was built through a declarative approach that supports animations, markup language, and gesture recognition. Future versions of Merlin will implement multi-character dialogs, additional actions, and extended interaction time.

This paper describes a system for embodied conversational agents (ECAs) developed at the University of Texas at El Paso by the Advanced aGent ENgagement Team (AGENT) and one of the applications -- Survival on Jungle Island -- built with this system. In the Jungle application, the ECA and a human interact with speech and gesture for approximately 40 -- 60 minutes in a game composed of 23 scenes (to maintain the demonstration feasible, participants will interact only with select scenes that showcase the capabilities of our system). Each scene comprises a collection of speech input, speech output, gesture input, gesture output, scenery, triggers, and decision points.

As a priority-setting exercise, we compared interactions between users and a simple spoken dialog system to interactions between users and a human operator. We observed usability events, places in which system behavior differed from human behavior, and for each we noted the impact, root causes, and prospects for improvement. We suggest some priority issues for research, involving not only such core areas as speech recognition and synthesis and language understanding and generation, but also less-studied topics such as adaptive or flexible timeouts, turn-taking and speaking rate.

Universal Usability will be met when affordable, useful, and usable technology accommodates the vast majority of the global population: this entails addressing challenges of technology variety, user diversity, and gaps in user knowledge in ways only beginning to be acknowledged by educational, corporate, and government agencies. (Ben Shneiderman, Communications of the ACM, 2000). Universal usability serves as both an ideal and a research agenda. Users, in their variety of characteristics and contexts, face a corresponding variety of barriers and impediments to the use of interfaces. These variations include age, location, culture, education, range of cognitive and physical abilities, and economic status. Problems with interfaces that many might find trivial can, for others, present significant issues of usability. As more information becomes available (and eventually available only) on-line, as e-government and e-commerce increase in importance, and as our lives become increasingly information-centered, these issues become correspondingly critical. Researchers in the field of human-computer interaction are now addressing this functional aspect of the digital divide.

Article Systematic design of spoken prompts Share on Authors: Brian Hansen Center for Spoken Language Understanding, Oregon Graduate, Institute of Science & Technology, 20000 N.W. Walker Road, Beaverton, OR Center for Spoken Language Understanding, Oregon Graduate, Institute of Science & Technology, 20000 N.W. Walker Road, Beaverton, ORView Profile , David G. Novick Center for Spoken Language Understanding, Oregon Graduate, Institute of Science & Technology, 20000 N.W. Walker Road, Beaverton, OR Center for Spoken Language Understanding, Oregon Graduate, Institute of Science & Technology, 20000 N.W. Walker Road, Beaverton, ORView Profile , Stephen Sutton Center for Spoken Language Understanding, Oregon Graduate, Institute of Science & Technology, 20000 N.W. Walker Road, Beaverton, OR Center for Spoken Language Understanding, Oregon Graduate, Institute of Science & Technology, 20000 N.W. Walker Road, Beaverton, ORView Profile Authors Info & Claims CHI '96: Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing SystemsApril 1996 Pages 157–164https://doi.org/10.1145/238386.238466Online:13 April 1996Publication History 8citation427DownloadsMetricsTotal Citations8Total Downloads427Last 12 Months7Last 6 weeks1 Get Citation AlertsNew Citation Alert added!This alert has been successfully added and will be sent to:You will be notified whenever a record that you have chosen has been cited.To manage your alert preferences, click on the button below.Manage my AlertsNew Citation Alert!Please log in to your account Save to BinderSave to BinderCreate a New BinderNameCancelCreateExport CitationPublisher SiteGet Access

The Spoken Dialogue Systems Laboratory at OGI gives students hands-on experience developing spoken dialogue systems (SDSs) in a rapid prototyping setting. The CSLU rapid prototyper (CSLUrp) allows students to quickly build and operate SDSs for dialogues of arbitrary complexity. CSLUrp consists of a graphical user interface that allows users to create SDSs with speech recognition, speech generation and arbitrary computation. When an application is designed, CSLUrp configures the system from the appropriate libraries in CSLUsh, the CSLU shell. The course explores CSLUrp in enough depth that students can craft and integrate their own low-level components (such as special purpose recognizers). In their final projects, students successfully built and demonstrated SDSs to do a variety of interesting tasks such as voice mail and directory assistance. Students found the course helpful and rated it highly.

In this study we examined prosodic characteristics of a word used in several distinct senses in a task-oriented corpus of spontaneous speech. We compared the pitch characteristics of the word "right" used in three different senses: as an acknowledgment, as a direction, and as an affirmative answer to a question. Significant differences in intonation for different classes of usage were found, although the differences are not reliable enough to allow systems to use prosody alone to distinguish between usages. These results suggest that pitch change as reported by a pitch tracker could serve as a confirming cue when analyzing ambiguous speech recognizer output, or could serve as input to a probabilistic parser to aid in disambiguating senses of homonyms.

A spoken language system combines speech recognition, natural language processing and human interface technology. It functions by recognizing the person's words, interpreting the sequence of words to obtain a meaning in terms of the application, and providing an appropriate response back to the user. Potential applications of spoken language systems range from simple tasks, such as retrieving information from an existing database (traffic reports, airline schedules), to interactive problem solving tasks involving complex planning and reasoning (travel planning, traffic routing), to support for multilingual interactions. We examine eight key areas in which basic research is needed to produce spoken language systems: (1) robust speech recognition; (2) automatic training and adaptation; (3) spontaneous speech; (4) dialogue models; (5) natural language response generation; (6) speech synthesis and speech generation; (7) multilingual systems; and (8) interactive multimodal systems. In each area, we identify key research challenges, the infrastructure needed to support research, and the expected benefits. We conclude by reviewing the need for multidisciplinary research, for development of shared corpora and related resources, for computational support and far rapid communication among researchers. The successful development of this technology will increase accessibility of computers to a wide range of users, will facilitate multinational communication and trade, and will create new research specialties and jobs in this rapidly expanding area.>

We refine and extend prior views of the description, purposes, and contexts-of-use of acknowledgment acts through empirical examination of the use of acknowledgments in task-based conversation. We distinguish three broad classes of acknowledgments (other←ackn, self←other←ackn, and self+ackn) and present a catalogue of 13 patterns within these classes that account for the specific uses of acknowledgment in the corpus.

We describe a study to determine the feasibility of using automatic speech recognition to collect information over the telephone for the Year 2000 census in the United States. The stages of research are protocol development, speech data collection and transcription, system development, and system evaluation. We developed a rapid prototyping methodology to produce two protocols now being used to collect data from callers solicited by the bureau of the census. We have collected speech from over 1000 callers, with a goal of 3000 complete calls. Two hundred calls have been transcribed at the word level. Initial results are reported for a baseline system tested on the transcribed calls. The baseline system is both speaker and vocabulary independent-it has not been trained on words from the recognition vocabulary. The system's error rate ranges between 2% and 21% for responses to the different prompts. We describe research now underway intended to produce a system that is sufficiently accurate and graceful to demonstrate feasibility of a voice response questionnaire.>

This paper describes a study conducted to determine the feasibility of using a spoken questionnaire to collect information for the Year 2000 Census in the USA. To refine the dialogue and to train recognizers, we collected complete protocols from over 4000 callers. For the responses labeled (about half), over 99 percent of the answers contain the desired information. The recognizers trained so far range in performance from 75 percent correct on year of birth to over 99 percent for marital status. We developed a prototype system that engages the callers in a dialogue to obtain the desired information, reviews the recognized information at the end of the call, and asks the caller to identify the response categories that are incorrect. 1. INTRODUCTION We have conducted a study to determine the feasibility of using an automated spoken questionnaire to collect information for the Year 2000 Census in the United States of America. The goal of the study was to develop and evaluate a telephone ...

Article Quick: a user-interface design kit for non-programmers Share on Authors: Sarah Douglas Department of Computer and Information Science, University of Oregon, Eugene, Oregon Department of Computer and Information Science, University of Oregon, Eugene, OregonView Profile , Eckehard Doerry Department of Computer and Information Science, University of Oregon, Eugene, Oregon Department of Computer and Information Science, University of Oregon, Eugene, OregonView Profile , David Novick Department of Computer and Information Science, University of Oregon, Eugene, Oregon Department of Computer and Information Science, University of Oregon, Eugene, OregonView Profile Authors Info & Claims UIST '90: Proceedings of the 3rd annual ACM SIGGRAPH symposium on User interface software and technologyAugust 1990 Pages 47–56https://doi.org/10.1145/97924.97930Online:01 August 1990Publication History 8citation523DownloadsMetricsTotal Citations8Total Downloads523Last 12 Months53Last 6 weeks0 Get Citation AlertsNew Citation Alert added!This alert has been successfully added and will be sent to:You will be notified whenever a record that you have chosen has been cited.To manage your alert preferences, click on the button below.Manage my AlertsNew Citation Alert!Please log in to your account Save to BinderSave to BinderCreate a New BinderNameCancelCreateExport CitationPublisher SiteGet Access

People use various techniques to reduce the complexity of realtime multiparty conversational interaction. These techniques—formal meetings, for example—generally restrict the format of the interaction in an attempt to reduce the amount of control information which must be processed by each conversant. This allows the conversants to concentrate more on domain specific information but severely reduces the efficiency of interaction. Previous approaches to the design of computer-mediated interaction (CMI) systems have largely attempted to automate such mechanisms. This paper examines the current state of research in the area of CMI systems and suggests a new direction for research in this area based on the utilisation of control information to increase communicative efficiency. To demonstrate the practical application of these ideas, an initial design for a CMI system which uses the concept of virtual conversants is presented. The CMI system assumes the burden of processing control information and presents to each conversant: a two party interaction model for control information a multiparty interaction model for domain information.