Roberta Catizone’s research while affiliated with Florida Institute for Human and Machine Cognition and other places

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Publications (40)


CALONIS: An Artificial Companion Within a Smart Home for the Care of Cognitively Impaired Patients
  • Conference Paper

December 2015

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61 Reads

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11 Citations

Lecture Notes in Computer Science

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Jan M. Jasiewicz

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Roberta Catizone

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[...]

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The paper describes a prototype Embodied Conversational Agent or Companion, called CALONIS, for a brain-injured Veteran with severe cognitive impairment. The CALONIS project is a sub-project of the larger Tampa VA SmartHome implementation initiative. CALONIS is intended to provide increased engagement, diversion and assistance beyond the usual mechanisms of providing assistance through text based prompting and interactions. We hope to eventually integrate CALONIS fully into the next generation of the Tampa VA SmartHome in which the SmartHome itself becomes a fully interactive and intelligent electronic caregiver. The project began with a Wizard-of-Oz version of CALONIS but even at this early stage we appear to have achieved high levels of patient engagement as well as in relation to the caregiver. The full CALONIS prototype is based on the Senior Companion project, originally developed as part of a large-scale EU project [1].


A prototype for a Conversational Companion for reminiscing about images

April 2011

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110 Reads

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28 Citations

Computer Speech & Language

This paper describes an initial prototype of the Companions project (www.companions-project.org): the Senior Companion (SC), designed to be a platform to display novel approaches to:(1)The use of Information Extraction (IE) techniques to extract the content of incoming dialogue utterances after an ASR phase.(2)The conversion of the input to RDF form to allow the generation of new facts from existing ones, under the control of a Dialogue Manager (DM), that also has access to stored knowledge and knowledge accessed in real time from the web, all in RDF form.(3)A DM expressed as a stack and network virtual machine that models mixed initiative in dialogue control.(4)A tuned dialogue act detector based on corpus evidence.The prototype platform was evaluated, and we describe this; it is also designed to support more extensive forms of emotion detection carried by both speech and lexical content, as well as extended forms of machine learning. We describe preliminary studies and results for these, in particular a novel approach to enabling reinforcement learning for open dialogue systems through the detection of emotion in the speech signal and its deployment as a form of a learned DM, at a higher level than the DM virtual machine and able to direct the SC's responses to a more emotionally appropriate part of its repertoire.


Some background on Dialogue Management and Conversational Speech for dialogue systems

April 2011

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331 Reads

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37 Citations

Computer Speech & Language

Several dialogue management (DM) architectures and conversational speech for dialogue systems are presented. Basic types of DM systems include dialogue grammars and frames, plan-based and collaborative systems, and conversational games theory. DM architectures include SmartKom, Trindi, WITAS, CONVERSE, COMIC, agent-based dialogue management, and DM and automatic speech recognition (ASR) language modeling. All data collection tasks should be tailored for the conversational scenario under consideration as each scenario can present different properties. It is shown in the multimodal dialogue system that turn taking can usually be achieved by a fusion of gesture, gaze, and intonation. Intonation within the speech signal informs the dialogue manager when new information is introduced into the current conversation. By placing established emotion detection methods within the recursive nature of conversation we can consider discourse as the exploitation of the shared set of interaction affordances.


The Future of Companionable Agents

January 2011

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37 Reads

COMPANIONS is a concept that aims to change the way we think about the relationships of people to computers and the Internet by developing a virtual 'Companion' to stand between individuals and the torrent of data on the Internet, including their own life information, which will soon be too large for people to handle easily without some new form of assistance. The Companion is intended as an agent or 'presence' that stays with a user for periods of time, longer than in conventional task-based dialogue systems, developing a relationship and 'knowing' and assisting its owner's experiences, preferences, plans, and wishes. The Companions concept aims to model a fuller range of conversation than has been done hitherto, both task and non-task based, and discusses what properties people will want in a long term computer Companion that is also an Internet agent in a new form.


A Companionable Agent

January 2011

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34 Reads

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1 Citation

Companions are agents devised to accompany users day by day building long-term relationships with them. They do not only assist users for particular tasks in sporadic times, but they provide more support and have more information to adapt themselves to each users' needs. Currently, these agents and their possibilities are being researched as a part of an EU project, which is described in this chapter.


Figure 6. One advice output of CLAD. 
Figure 7. Another advice output of CLAD. 
A Cognitive Architecture for Simulating Bodies and Minds
  • Article
  • Full-text available

January 2011

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134 Reads

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6 Citations

AMIA ... Annual Symposium proceedings / AMIA Symposium. AMIA Symposium

This paper presents an overview of a cognitive architecture, OntoAgent, that supports the creation and deployment of intelligent agents capable of simulating human-like abilities. The agents, which have a simulated mind and, if applicable, a simulated body, are intended to operate as members of multi-agent teams featuring both artificial and human agents. The agent architecture and its underlying knowledge resources and processors are being developed in a sufficiently generic way to support a variety of applications. In this paper we briefly describe the architecture and two applications being configured within it: the Maryland Virtual Patient (MVP) system for training medical personnel and the CLinician's ADvisor (CLAD). We organize the discussion around four aspects of agent modeling and how they are utilized in the two applications: physiological simulation, modeling an agent's knowledge and learning, decision-making and language processing.

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A world-hybrid approach to a conversational Companion for reminiscing about images

April 2010

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4 Reads

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3 Citations

What will it be like to admit Artificial Companions into our society? How will they change our relations with each other? How important will they be in the emotional and practical lives of their owners – since we know that people became emotionally dependent even on simple devices like the Tamagotchi? How much social life might they have in contacting each other? The contributors to this book discuss the possibility and desirability of some form of long-term computer Companions now being a certainty in the coming years. It is a good moment to consider, from a set of wide interdisciplinary perspectives, both how we shall construct them technically as well as their personal philosophical and social consequences. By Companions we mean conversationalists or confidants – not robots – but rather computer software agents whose function will be to get to know their owners over a long period. Those may well be elderly or lonely, and the contributions in the book focus not only on assistance via the internet (contacts, travel, doctors etc.) but also on providing company and Companionship, by offering aspects of real personalization.



Table 1. KE for the clinical model of a disease. 
Table 2. Sample precondition of good practice. 
Hybrid Methods of Knowledge Elicitation within a Unified Representational Knowledge Scheme.

January 2010

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103 Reads

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1 Citation

This paper presents a case study showing how hybrid methods of knowledge elicitation can be used to build models in support of the functioning of intelligent agents. What facilitates both the elicitation of knowledge and its conversion into actionable models is the use of a unified representational knowledge scheme - specifically, an unambiguous, ontologically grounded metalanguage that serves as the language of all recorded knowledge as well as the language in which agents remember and reason.


Demonstration of a Prototype for a Conversational Companion for Reminiscing about Images.

January 2010

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289 Reads

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3 Citations

This paper describes an initial prototype demonstrator of a Companion, designed as a platform for novel approaches to the following: 1) The use of Information Extraction (IE) techniques to extract the content of incoming dialogue utterances after an Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) phase, 2) The conversion of the input to Resource Descriptor Format (RDF) to allow the generation of new facts from existing ones, under the control of a Dialogue Manger (DM), that also has access to stored knowledge and to open knowledge accessed in real time from the web, all in RDF form, 3) A DM implemented as a stack and network virtual machine that models mixed initiative in dialogue control, and 4) A tuned dialogue act detector based on corpus evidence. The prototype platform was evaluated, and we describe this briefly; it is also designed to support more extensive forms of emotion detection carried by both speech and lexical content, as well as extended forms of machine learning.


Citations (30)


... Within Europe and North America, innovations in care robots include those that are designed specifically to fulfil certain tasks. For example, CALONIS, a type of conversational artificial companion is developed for the purpose of engaging and interacting with former soldiers who suffered from brain trauma with cognitive injuries (Wilks et al. 2015). These care robots are programmed to remind the users about appointments, and other activities in their daily lives such as brushing their teeth. ...

Reference:

Care Robots for the Elderly: Legal, Ethical Considerations and Regulatory Strategies
CALONIS: An Artificial Companion Within a Smart Home for the Care of Cognitively Impaired Patients
  • Citing Conference Paper
  • December 2015

Lecture Notes in Computer Science

... Concept hierarchies are very expensive resources. Lexical databases such as WordNet [6] or Euro-WordNet [9] are currently widely used in NLP applications (e.g. in Question Answering [4] or in automatic hyperlinking [2]). However, they required huge efforts and large investments. ...

Multilingual authoring

... Examples include the morphological decomposition described by Miller and Chapman (1983) and Cappelli, Maccari, and Pfanner ( 1991) in order to compute the mean length ofutterance. Other kinds of statistical automatic assessment of corpora of impaired speech have been carried out by Perkins (I 994) and Perkins, Catizone, Peers, and Wilks (1997). More complex linguistic evaluations, such as the language assessment, remediation, and screening procedure (LARSP) created by Crystal, Fletcher, and Garman (1976), must be performed by hand. ...

Clinical computational corpus linguistics: A case study

... The Senior Companion (SC) prototype (Wilks, 2007(Wilks, , 2008Wilks et al., 2008) was designed to make a rapid advance in the first two years of a project so as to be the basis for a second round of prototypes embodying more advanced ML. This strategy was deliberately chosen to avoid a well-known problem with experimental AI systems: that a whole project is spent in design so that a prototype never emerges until the very end, which is then never fully evaluated and, most importantly, nothing is ever built upon the experience obtained in its construction. ...

The Companions paradigm as a method of eliciting and organising life data

... Exchanged cations K Nacation Na + + X-K ⇔ K + + X-Na 0.1136 Na + + 0.5 X 2 -Ca ⇔ 0.5 Ca 2+ + X-Na 0.5147 Na + + 0.5 X 2 -Mg ⇔ 0.5 Mg 2+ + X-Na 0.6175 with a 2-D THM model by Mon (2017) which was tested with the measured data reported by Bárcena et al. (2006) and Martínez et al. (2016). The initial saturation degree of the bentonite coincides with the profile computed with the 2-D THM model (Fig. 3). ...

Namic Project: Final Report
  • Citing Article

... Many of the developments since then have been a series of extensions to the work of Lehnert and Riloff on Autoslog (Riloff and Lehnert, 1993), the automatic induction of a lexicon for IE. This tradition of work goes back to an AI notion that might be described as lexical tuning, that of adapting a lexicon automatically to new senses in texts, a notion discussed in (Wilks and Catizone, 1999) and going back to work like Wilks (1979) and Granger (1977) on detecting new preferences of words in texts and interpreting novel lexical items from context and stored knowledge. These notions are important, not only for IE in general but, in particular, as it adapts to traditional AI tasks like QA. ...

Making information extraction more adaptive
  • Citing Article

... Kaczorowska-Spychalska (2019) argues that Chatbots have a huge potential to increase user engagement, which might lead to increased conversions and sales for any company. According to Batacharia et al. (1999), the necessity for such chatbots arose as a result of the growing number of personal computers and people's desire to communicate with them. Customers must be communicated with in order for firms to grow profitably and efficiently. ...

CONVERSE: A conversational companion

... Multi-modality has been explored in a very limited way to date for curating VAs in different domains and tasks. In [10], the authors designed a multi-modal DM module, which was part of the COMIC demonstrator for a bathroom design application. The multi-modal features used by these modules were speech and gesture of the user interacting with the system. ...

Multimodal Dialogue Management in the COMIC Project

... Ontologies often focus on noun hierarchies and overlook hierarchies based on verbs, event structures or argument structures. A promising exception is Basili et al.'s (2002) paper which develops event hierarchies for information extraction and multilingual document analysis. Another approach is presented by Petersen (2001). ...

Knowledge-Based Multilingual Document Analysis