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Towards a conversational agent architecture to favor knowledge discovery in serious games

Published: 08 November 2011 Publication History

Abstract

"Conversational Agents" (CAs) are virtual characters controlled by the computer and able to dialogue with users in natural language. CAs are usually employed in virtual world applications, such as for training, gaming or advertising, in order to increase the situation realism and user involvement.
We are implementing a natural language interaction system with a clear focus on instructional dialogues aimed at favoring a player's acquisition of knowledge on specific topics through interaction with specialized NPC. Another key requirement for the system is easy and efficient writing and maintenance of the texts, also by author with no specific expertise on computational language technology.
The system we propose includes a strategy and a tactical level. The former is responsible for managing the high-level aspects of the conversation, while the latter responds to the player's queries by relying on an original combination of an essential syntactical analysis and an ITF-IDF-based procedure.
The technique specifically targets a (educational) gaming application domain. However, we believe that the technique could be extended to meet the requirements of other application domains.

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cover image ACM Other conferences
ACE '11: Proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Advances in Computer Entertainment Technology
November 2011
562 pages
ISBN:9781450308274
DOI:10.1145/2071423
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Published: 08 November 2011

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Author Tags

  1. conversational agents
  2. dialogue system
  3. natural language interaction
  4. natural languge processing
  5. non player characters
  6. serious games

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