Advanced Social Interaction With Agents

This book presents lectures given at the 8th International Workshop on Spoken Dialog Systems. As agents evolve in terms of their ability to carry on a dialog with users, several qualities are emerging as essential components of a successful system. Users do not carry on long conversations on only one topic—they tend to switch between several topics. Thus the authors are observing the emergence of multi-domain systems that enable users to seamlessly hop from one domain to another. The systems have become active social partners. Accordingly, work on social dialog has become crucial to active and engaging human–robot/agent interaction. These new systems call for a coherent framework that guides their actions as chatbots and conversational agents. Human–Robot/Agent assessment mechanisms naturally lend themselves to this task. As these systems increasingly assist humans in a multitude of tasks, the ethics of their existence, their design and their interaction with users are becoming crucial issues. This book discusses the essential players and features involved, such as chat-based agents, multi-domain dialog systems, human–robot interaction, social dialog policy, and advanced dialog system architectures.

This book presents lectures given at the 8th International Workshop on Spoken Dialog Systems. As agents evolve in terms of their ability to carry on a dialog with users, several qualities are emerging as essential components of a successful system. Users do not carry on long conversations on only one topic--they tend to switch between several topics. Thus the authors are observing the emergence of multi-domain systems that enable users to seamlessly hop from one domain to another. The systems have become active social partners. Accordingly, work on social dialog has become crucial to active and engaging human-robot/agent interaction. These new systems call for a coherent framework that guides their actions as chatbots and conversational agents. Human-Robot/Agent assessment mechanisms naturally lend themselves to this task. As these systems increasingly assist humans in a multitude of tasks, the ethics of their existence, their design and their interaction with users are becoming crucial issues. This book discusses the essential players and features involved, such as chat-based agents, multi-domain dialog systems, human-robot interaction, social dialog policy, and advanced dialog system architectures.

This book compiles and presents a synopsis on current global research efforts to push forward the state of the art in dialogue technologies, including advances to language and context understanding, and dialogue management, as well as human–robot interaction, conversational agents, question answering and lifelong learning for dialogue systems.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the workshops co-located with the 4th International Joint Conference on Ambient Intelligence, AmI 2013, held in Dublin, Ireland, in December 2013. The 33 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from numerous submissions to the following workshops: 5th International Workshop on Intelligent Environments Supporting Healthcare and Well-being (WISHWell’13) 3d International workshop on Pervasive and Context-Aware Middleware (PerCAM’13), 2nd International Workshop on Adaptive Robotic Ecologies (ARE'13), International Workshop on Aesthetic Intelligence (AxI'13), First International Workshop on Uncertainty in Ambient Intelligence (UAmI13). The papers are organized in topical sections on intelligent environments supporting healthcare and well-being; adaptive robotic ecologies; uncertainty in ambient intelligence; aesthetic intelligence; pervasive and context-aware middleware.

This double volume book set constitutes the refereed proceedings of 4th International Conference, AI-HCI 2023, held as part of the 25th International Conference, HCI International 2023, which was held virtually in Copenhagen, Denmark in July 2023. The total of 1578 papers and 396 posters included in the HCII 2023 proceedings was carefully reviewed and selected from 7472 submissions. The first volume focuses on topics related to Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence, explainability, transparency and trustworthiness, ethics and fairness, as well as AI-supported user experience design. The second volume focuses on topics related to AI for language, text, and speech-related tasks, human-AI collaboration, AI for decision-support and perception analysis, and innovations in AI-enabled systems.

The two-volume set LNAI 14453 and 14454 constitutes the refereed post-conference proceedings of the 15th International Conference on Social Robotics, ICSR 2023, held in Doha, Qatar, during December 4–7, 2023. The 68 revised full papers presented in these proceedings were carefully reviewed and selected from 83 submissions. They deal with topics around the interaction between humans and intelligent robots and on the integration of robots into the fabric of society. This year the special topic is "Human-Robot Collaboration: Sea; Air; Land; Space and Cyberspace”, focusing on all physical and cyber-physical domains where humans and robots collaborate.

This book constitutes the proceedings of the 24th International Conference on Text, Speech, and Dialogue, TSD 2021, held in Olomouc, Czech Republic, in September 2021.* The 2 keynote speeches and 46 papers presented in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected from 101 submissions. The topical sections "Text", "Speech", and "Dialogue" deal with the following issues: speech recognition; corpora and language resources; speech and spoken language generation; tagging, classification and parsing of text and speech; semantic processing of text and speech; integrating applications of text and speech processing; automatic dialogue systems; multimodal techniques and modelling, and others. * Due to the COVID-19 pandemic the conference was held in a "hybrid" mode.

Introducing students to core sociological concepts by debunking popular misconceptions Is it true that "numbers don′t lie?" Is America "the land of equal opportunity?" Is marriage a "dying institution?" Oft-repeated adages like these shape our beliefs about the society we live in. Each essay in Second Thoughts reviews a conventional wisdom familiar to both instructors and students. The authors introduce relevant sociological concepts and theories in order to explain, qualify, and sometimes debunk that conventional wisdom. This unique text encourages students to step back and sharpen their analytic focus. 23 engaging essays reveal the complexity of social reality and demonstrate the role of sociology in everyday life.