BCS Specialist Group on Artificial Intelligence (BCS SGAI)
*** This event replaces the Machine Intelligence competition
previously advertised ***
Conversational Agents: Betty and The Narrator
A Demonstration with Hands-on Experience
Collette Curry, Manchester Metropolitan University
Monday October 7th 2013 from 6 p.m.-7.30 p.m. (with refreshments
provided from 5 p.m. onwards) at the British Computer Society London
Office, 5 Southampton Street, London. The nearest underground
stations
are Covent Garden, Embankment and Temple.
This is a free event, open to all, but prior registration is needed
to
gain entry to the building.
The emphasis will be on a demonstration with hands on experience. Our
aim is to allow the maximum number of people to interact both with
'Betty', the reminiscence aid and 'The Narrator', which knows a lot
about the history of HMS Ark Royal. Both systems are based on
research
carried out at Manchester Metropolitan University by Collette Curry
and others.
'Betty' encourages conversation and reminiscence with participants.
She learns from the conversation and allows each participant to build
up a user dictionary of themes and subjects which can be recalled in
future conversations. Use of a specially devised ontology for
reminiscence coupled with the WordNet corpus allows the agent to
converse about a wide range of relevant subject matter. 'Betty' has
been successfully used in experiments which tested for improved well-
being and also improvements in ageing memory in older people through
conversational stimulation. An additional benefit is the sharing of
information with family members who can then take part in the
reminiscence session with the participant.
For 'The Narrator', creative writing is imported directly into the
agent and added it to the knowledge base about the Ark Royal, thus
allowing the pupil interacting with the agent to create their own
story and to direct what happens next. This is a development from
scripted adventure games and has proved very popular with pupils
experimenting with the system (many of whom had special needs).
The session will start with an introduction to Betty and The
Narrator. This will be followed by the hands-on sessions using
laptops in small groups which will last about an hour (rotating
between different related activities every 5-10 minutes):
- creating a chatbot using a provided framework
- meeting Betty the conversational agent and interacting with her
(various versions, web and local) - meeting The Narrator chatbot and
interacting with him (web based) - creative writing and importation
to
a chatbot framework for The Narrator
The event will end with a question and answer session.
An online registration form is available at
https://events.bcs.org/book/586/
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