Accession Number:

ADA459219

Title:

Dealing with Out of Domain Questions in Virtual Characters

Descriptive Note:

Conference paper

Corporate Author:

UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA MARINA DEL REY CA INST FOR CREATIVE TECHNOLOGIES

Personal Author(s):

• Patel, Ronakkumar
• Leuski, Anton
• Traum, David

Report Date:

2006-01-01

Pagination or Media Count:

13.0

Abstract:

We consider the problem of designing virtual characters that support speech-based interactions in a limited domain. Previously we have shown that classification can be an effective and robust tool for selecting appropriate in-domain responses. In this paper, we consider the problem of dealing with out-of-domain user questions. We introduce a taxonomy of out-of-domain response types. We consider three classification architectures for selecting the most appropriate out-of-domain responses. We evaluate these architectures and show that they significantly improve the quality of the response selection making the users interaction with the virtual character more natural and engaging.

Descriptors:

• *ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
• SYMPOSIA
• MAN COMPUTER INTERFACE
• CLASSIFICATION

Subject Categories:

• Cybernetics
• Linguistics
• Psychology

Distribution Statement:

APPROVED FOR PUBLIC RELEASE