Events Calendar

NL Seminar-What Can We Learn From An Agent that Plays Word-Guessing Games?

Speaker: Eli Pincus, USC/ICT

Talk Title: What Can We Learn From An Agent that Plays Word-Guessing Games?

Abstract: In this talk I will discuss an agent that can play a simple word-guessing game with a user. The fast-paced, multi-modal, and interactive nature of the dialogue that takes place in word-guessing games are challenging for today's dialogue systems to emulate. The agent serves as a research testbed to explore issues of fast-paced incremental interaction and user satisfaction in such a setting. I will trace how the agent's design was motivated by a human-human corpus as well as discuss two empirical studies involving the agent. The first study was designed to learn an algorithm to automatically select effective clues (clues likely to elicit a correct guess from a human). The second study was an evaluation of several synthetic voices and 1 human voice which showed how participant's subjective perceptions and objective task performances fluctuated based on the voice used and the duration of the participant's exposure to the voice.

Biography: Eli Pincus is a 3rd year USC PhD student and a graduate research assistant in the Natural Dialogue Group at
USC Institute for Creative Technologies. He is advised by Professor David Traum. Eli's main research is in human-computer dialogue. Since joining USC he has been working on improving virtual human dialogue. He won the best computer science department TA award in spring 2015. He was a research intern in the NLP and AI group at Nuance Communications in summer 2015.


Host: Nima Pourdamghani and Kevin Knight

More Info: http://nlg.isi.edu/nl-seminar/

Location: Information Science Institute (ISI) - 6th Flr Conf Rm # 689, Marina Del Rey

Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

Contact: Peter Zamar

Event Link: http://nlg.isi.edu/nl-seminar/