12923227
Levels of Representation in the Annotation of Emotion for the Specification of Expressivity in ECAs
In this paper we present a two-steps approach towards the creation of affective Embodied Conversational Agents (ECAs): annotation of a real-life nonacted emotional corpus and animation by copy-synthesis. The basis of our approach is to study how coders perceive and annotate at several levels the emotions observed in a corpus of emotionally rich TV video interviews. We use their annotations to specify the expressive behavior of an agent at several levels. We explain how such an approach can be useful for providing knowledge as input for the specification of non-basic patterns of emotional behaviors to be displayed by the ECA (e.g. which perceptual cues and levels of annotation are required for enabling the proper recognition of the emotions).
14471368
A Unified Framework for Constructing Multimodal Experiments and Applications
Inspired by a Wizard of Oz (WOZ) simulation experiment, we developed a working prototype of a system that enables users to interact with a map display through synergistic combinations of pen and voice. To address many of the issues raised by multimodal fusion, our implementation employed a distributed multi-agent framework to coordinate parallel competition and cooperation among processing components. Since then, the agent-based infrastructure has been enhanced with a collaboration technology, creating a framework in which multiple humans and automated agents can naturally interact within the same graphical workspace.Our current endeavour is the leveraging of this architecture to create a unified implementation framework for simultaneously developing both WOZ simulated systems and their fully-automated counterparts. Bootstrapping effects made possible by such an approach are illustrated by an experiment currently under way in our laboratory: as a naive subject draws, writes, and speaks requests to a (simulated) interactive map, a hidden Wizard responds as efficiently as possible using our best fullyautomated system, through either standard graphical interface devices or multimodal combinations of pen and voice. The input choices made by both subject and Wizard are invaluable, and the data collected from each can be applied directly to evaluating and improving the automated part of the system.
14705463
C to Java migration experiences
With the growing popularity of the Java programming language for both client and server side applications in network-centric computing, there is a rising need for programming libraries that can be easily integrated into Java programs. In a previous paper, we surveyed current strategies for integrating C source code into Java programs, pointed out their weaknesses and presented goals for an improved migration approach. In this paper, we present the Ephedra approach to software migration and report on the results of three case studies transliterating C source code to Java using the Ephedra environment.
8592573
Contextual Spelling Correction Using Latent Semantic Analysis
Contextual spelling errors are defined as the use of an incorrect, though valid, word in a particular sentence or context. Traditional spelling checkers flag misspelled words, but they do not typically attempt to identify words that are used incorrectly in a sentence. We explore the use of Latent Semantic Analysis for correcting these incorrectly used words and the results are compared to earlier work based on a Bayesian classifier.
2946678
Conventional Metaphor and the Lexicon
Metaphor and other forms of non-literal language are essential parts of language which have direct bearing on theories of lexical semantics. Neither narrow theories of lexical semantics, nor theories relying solely on world knowledge are sufficient to account for our ability to generate and interpret non-literal language. This paper presents an emerging approach that may provide such an account. This approach is based on systematic representations that capture non-literal language conventions, and mechanisms that can dynamically understand and learn new uses as they are encountered.
61042466
The berkeley UNIX consultant project
UC (UNIX Consultant) is an intelligent, natural language interface that allows naive users to learn about the UNIX2 operating system. UC was undertaken because the task was thought to be both a fertile domain for artificial intelligence (AI) research and a useful application of AI work in planning, reasoning, natural language processing, and knowledge representation.The current implementation of UC comprises the following components: a language analyzer, called ALANA, produces a representation of the content contained in an utterance; an inference component, called a concretion mechanism, that further refines this content; a goal analyzer, PAGAN, that hypothesizes the plans and goals under which the user is operating; an agent, called UCEgo, that decides on UC's goals and proposes plans for them; a domain planner, called KIP, that computes a plan to address the user's request; an expression mechanism, UCExpress, that determines the content to be communicated to the user, and a language production mechanism, UCGen, that expresses UC's response in English.UC also contains a component, called KNOME, that builds a model of the user's knowledge state with respect to UNIX. Another mechanism, UCTeacher, allows a user to add knowledge of both English vocabulary and facts about UNIX to UC's knowledge base. This is done by interacting with the user in natural language.All these aspects of UC make use of knowledge represented in a knowledge representation system called KODIAK. KODIAK is a relation-oriented system that is intended to have wide representational range and a clear semantics, while maintaining a cognitive appeal. All of UC's knowledge, ranging from its most general concepts to the content of a particular utterance, is represented in KODIAK.
5705354
BAR fault tolerance for cooperative services
This paper describes a general approach to constructing cooperative services that span multiple administrative domains. In such environments, protocols must tolerate both Byzantine behaviors when broken, misconfigured, or malicious nodes arbitrarily deviate from their specification and rational behaviors when selfish nodes deviate from their specification to increase their local benefit. The paper makes three contributions: (1) It introduces the BAR (Byzantine, Altruistic, Rational) model as a foundation for reasoning about cooperative services; (2) It proposes a general three-level architecture to reduce the complexity of building services under the BAR model; and (3) It describes an implementation of BAR-B the first cooperative backup service to tolerate both Byzantine users and an unbounded number of rational users. At the core of BAR-B is an asynchronous replicated state machine that provides the customary safety and liveness guarantees despite nodes exhibiting both Byzantine and rational behaviors. Our prototype provides acceptable performance for our application: our BAR-tolerant state machine executes 15 requests per second, and our BAR-B backup service can back up 100MB of data in under 4 minutes.