1,721,121 research outputs found
Exploring the Lexical Semantics of Dialogue Acts
No full textPeople proceed in their conversations through a series of dialogue
acts to yield some specific communicative intention. In this
paper, we study the task of automatic labeling dialogues with the
proper dialogue acts, relying on empirical methods and simply
exploiting lexical semantics of the utterances. In particular, we
present some experiments in both a supervised and an unsupervised
framework on an English and an Italian corpus of dialogue
transcriptions. In the experiments we consider the settings of
dealing with or without additional information from the dialogue
structure. The evaluation displays good results,
regardless of the used language. We
conclude the paper exploring the relation between the
communicative goal of an utterance and its affective content
Modeling user interpersonal stances in affective dialogues with an ECA
No full textSince several forms of anthropomorphic behavior
of users towards technologies have been demonstrated,
ongoing research on intelligent interfaces aims at developing
adapting conversational systems which tailor their behavior
according to both cognitive and affective features of users.
We present an approach for combining results of our
previous experience in detecting and modeling interpersonal
stances in advice-giving dialogues with an ECA. We sketch
an algorithm for adaptation of the behavior of the agent
according to the user social attitude and level of engagement
Recognizing signals of social attitude in interacting with Ambient Conversational Systems
No full textAmbient Intelligence systems require a natural and personalized experience in interacting with services provided by the environment. In this view, the interaction may happen either in a pervasive way, through a combination of devices embedded in the environment, or using a conversational interface acting as an environment concierge. In the latter case, the interface can be embodied in a conversational agent able to involve users in a human-like conversation and to establish a social relation with them. Developing such an Ambient Conversational System (ACS) requires a model of the user that considers not only the cognitive ingredients of his mental state, but also extra-rational factors such as affect, engagement, attitudes. This paper describes a multimodal framework for recognizing the social attitude of users during the interaction with an embodied agent in a smart environment. In particular, we started from the analysis and annotation of advisory dialogs between humans and then we used the annotated corpus to build a framework for recognizing the social attitude in multimodal dialogs with an ACS. Results of the study show an acceptable performance of the framework in recognizing and monitoring the social attitude during the dialog with an ACS. We also compared results of the analysis of human-human interactions with respect to the human-ACS interaction and, even if the level of initiative of subjects during the dialog was lower in this latter modality, the difference in the average number of social moves was not significant, thus showing that subjects probably were keen to establish a social relation with the conversational agent
Introduction to the special issue on affect awareness in software engineering
No full textAffective computing has emerged in the past decade as a multidisciplinary research field concerning the detection, use, understanding, and modeling of emotions and affect in computing systems. Nowadays, affective computing is an established discipline whose methods and techniques are being applied to many application domains. This special issue reflects an emerging trend to study the role of affect in software engineering. Researchers have even created focused venues such as the International Workshop on Emotion Awareness in Software Engineering (SEmotion), at the International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE),1now in its third edition, and the International Workshop on Affective Computing for Requirements Engineering (AffectRE), co-located with the Requirements Engineering Conference (RE).2Affective states such as personality traits, attitudes, moods, and emotions are a crucial part of people's everyday performance at work [1]. This applies also to software development [2, 3, 4]which is also well-known as an intellectual, creative problem-solving activity. To achieve the best chance of successfully executing software engineering projects, stakeholders must demonstrate positive affect (such as trust or appreciation), agree on display rules for emotions and moods, and hold a mutual commitment to the project goals. Leveraging emotion awareness in software engineering could enhance development performance, software quality, mood regulation within a project team, and lead to fruitful interactions with all stakeholders. Software developers experience a wide range of emotions in their work [5, 6, 7]. As new technologies and requirements constantly arise, developers also should be able to adapt to flexible work conditions. Negative affective states (e.g. resentment or frustration) might become an obstacle when reacting to undesirable facts, such as negative customer feedback [8]. Similarly, moods can impact the cognitive processes involved in learning new programming languages and APIs, solving tasks with high reasoning complexity, and performing typical programming tasks [5, 4]. Finally, software engineering requires a great deal of social interaction, which leads to the widespread sharing of affective states. Awareness of the project mood [9, 10, 11] communication style [12, 13], and teammates’ responses might help developers wisely lead, manage, work together, and improve the outcomes of social activities [8]. The goal of this Special Issue is to present the opportunities and challenges of combining affective computing studies with research on human aspects in software engineering. On one hand, we aim to investigate the impact of affective states (emotions, moods, attitudes, personality traits,etc.) on individual and group performance, commitment, and collaboration in software development. On the other, we aim to foster the consideration of issues posed by exploiting affective computing as a new method for empirical software engineering. The call for papers invited high-quality research articles addressing challenges posed by affect awareness in software engineering. In this call, extended papers from SEmotion ’17, the Second International Workshop on Emotion Awareness in Software Engineering, (co-located with ICSE3) were also eligible for submission. After a careful review process in which each submission received at least three reviews, five high quality papers were accepted for publication. We congratulate the authors of the accepted papers and thank everyone who submitted a contribution to this Special Issue. We also thank the reviewers for their hard work, and the editors of the Journal of Systems and Software for accepting our Special Issue proposal and assisting us during the entire process
The Role of Social Media in Affective Trust Building in Customer-Supplier Relationships
Full text linkTrust represents a key issue in building successful customer-supplier relationships. In this sense, social software represents a powerful means for fostering trust by establishing a direct, more personal communication channel with customers. Therefore, companies are now investing in so-cial media for building their social digital brand and strengthening relationships with their cus-tomers. In this paper, we presented two experiments by means of which we investigated the role of traditional websites and social media in trust building along the cognitive and affective di-mensions. We hypothesize that traditional websites (content-oriented) and social media (interac-tion-oriented) may have a different effect on trust building in customer-supplier relationships, based on the first impression provided to potential customers. Although additional research is still needed, our findings add to the existing body of evidence that both cognitive and affective trust can be successfully fostered through online presence. Specifically, social media provides companies with tools to communicate benevolence to potential customer and, therefore, foster the affective commitment of customers. Traditional websites, instead, are more appropriate for communicating the competence and reliability of a company, by fostering trust building along the cognitive dimension. The results of our studies provide implications for researchers and practi-tioners, by highlighting the importance of combining the two media for effectively building a trustworthy online company image
User attitude towards an embodied conversational agent: Effects of the interaction mode
No full textWe describe how the interaction mode with an embodied conversational agent (ECA) affects the users' perception of the agent and their behavior during interaction, and propose a method to recognize the social attitude of users towards the agent from their verbal behavior. A corpus of human-ECA dialogues was collected with a Wizard-of-Oz study in which the input mode of the user moves was varied (written vs. speech-based). After labeling the corpus, we evaluated the relationship between input mode and social attitude of users towards the agent. The results show that, by increasing naturalness of interaction, spoken input produces a warmer attitude of users and a richer language: this effect is more evident for users with a background in humanities. Recognition of signs of social attitude is needed for adapting the ECA's verbal and nonverbal behavior. © 2010 Elsevier B.V
Social Media and Trust Building in Virtual Teams: The Design of a Replicated Experiment
No full textIn this paper, we present the proposal for a partial replication of a controlled experiment to further assess how knowing personal and expertise information about other team members may enhance initial trust building. Other than increasing confidence into the findings of the original study, we also aim at evaluating whether the provision of personal social media information, can lead to even higher level of trust in virtual teams
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