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Small Talk Is More than Chit-Chat

Exploiting Structures of Casual Conversations for a Virtual Agent

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Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNAI,volume 7526))

Abstract

An approach of improving the small talk capabilities of an existing virtual agent architecture is presented. Findings in virtual agent research revealed the need to pay attention to the sophisticated structures found in (human) casual conversations. In particular, existing dialogue act tag sets lack of tags adequately reflecting the subtle structures found in small talk. The approach presented here structures dialogues on two different levels. The micro level consists of meta information (speech functions) that dialogue acts can be tagged with. The macro level is concerned with ordering individual dialogue acts into sequences. The extended dialogue engine allows for a fine-grained selection of responses, enabling the agent to produce varied small talk sequences.

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Mattar, N., Wachsmuth, I. (2012). Small Talk Is More than Chit-Chat. In: Glimm, B., Krüger, A. (eds) KI 2012: Advances in Artificial Intelligence. KI 2012. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 7526. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-33347-7_11

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-33347-7_11

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-642-33346-0

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-642-33347-7

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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