Abstract
Embodied conversational agents (ECAs) have been put forward as a promising means for the training of social skills. The traditional approach to drive the behaviour of ECAs during human-agent dialogues is to use conversation trees. Although this approach is easy to use and very transparent, an important limitation of conversation trees is that the resulting behaviour of the ECAs is often perceived as predictable. To provide ECAs with more sophisticated behaviour, the current paper proposes an approach to endow them with mental states. The approach is illustrated by a motivational example in the domain of aggression de-escalation training.
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Notes
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More information on this project, called ‘Simulation-based Training of Resilience in Emergencies and Stressful Situations’, can be found at http://stress.few.vu.nl.
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Acknowledgements
This research was supported by funding from the National Initiative Brain and Cognition, coordinated by the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO), under grant agreement No. 056-25-013. The authors would like to thank Karel van den Bosch for a number of fruitful discussions.
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Bosse, T., Provoost, S. (2015). On Conversational Agents with Mental States. In: Brinkman, WP., Broekens, J., Heylen, D. (eds) Intelligent Virtual Agents. IVA 2015. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 9238. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-21996-7_6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-21996-7_6
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