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Handling out of domain topics by a conversational character

Published: 10 September 2008 Publication History

Abstract

Unlike traditional task-oriented dialog systems, one of the goals of conversational applications is to keep the user engaged and interested for as long as possible. This paper describes a technique that we implemented for dealing with the problem of out-of-domain topics and successfully integrated in a fully functional conversational system. In our approach, we exploit a simple and freely available coarsegrained ontology, namely Google's directory' structure, in order to automatically categorize unknown words and combines it with the existing ontological properties and dialog acts to create an automated semantic representation. We also resort to available web-based question and answering (QA) systems to generate answers to user's questions that are outside the domains covered by the application. Further, we make a first attempt at categorizing the retrieved information to generate appropriate non-verbal behaviors synced up with spoken utterances. The evaluation of the complete system shows promising results for the future and suggests that we are on the right track in terms of our approach for a better handling of out-of-domain topics.

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Cited By

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  • (2012)Connecting Question Answering and Conversational AgentsKI - Künstliche Intelligenz10.1007/s13218-012-0208-126:4(381-390)Online publication date: 29-May-2012
  • (2010)Textual vs. Graphical Interaction in an Interactive Fiction GameInteractive Storytelling10.1007/978-3-642-16638-9_29(228-231)Online publication date: 2010
  • (2009)Evaluation of a domain independent approach to natural language processing for game-like user interfaces2009 IEEE Symposium on Computational Intelligence and Games10.1109/CIG.2009.5286470(225-232)Online publication date: Sep-2009

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cover image ACM Conferences
DIMEA '08: Proceedings of the 3rd international conference on Digital Interactive Media in Entertainment and Arts
September 2008
551 pages
ISBN:9781605582481
DOI:10.1145/1413634
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: 10 September 2008

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Author Tags

  1. QA systems
  2. multimodal conversational systems
  3. out-of-domain topics
  4. user interfaces

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DIMEA '08 Paper Acceptance Rate 59 of 77 submissions, 77%;
Overall Acceptance Rate 59 of 77 submissions, 77%

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Cited By

View all
  • (2012)Connecting Question Answering and Conversational AgentsKI - Künstliche Intelligenz10.1007/s13218-012-0208-126:4(381-390)Online publication date: 29-May-2012
  • (2010)Textual vs. Graphical Interaction in an Interactive Fiction GameInteractive Storytelling10.1007/978-3-642-16638-9_29(228-231)Online publication date: 2010
  • (2009)Evaluation of a domain independent approach to natural language processing for game-like user interfaces2009 IEEE Symposium on Computational Intelligence and Games10.1109/CIG.2009.5286470(225-232)Online publication date: Sep-2009

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