Date: Thursday, April 25th, 2019 

Time: 2:00pm - 3:30pm 

Location: 122, Essex Hall

 An Embodied Conversational Agent (ECA) is an intelligent agent that works as the front end of software applications to interact with users through verbal/nonverbal expressions and to provide online assistance without the limits of time, location, and language. To help to improve the experience of human-computer interaction, there is an increasing need to empower ECA with not only the realistic look of its human counterparts but also a higher level of intelligence. This thesis first highlights the main topics related to the construction of ECA, including different approaches of dialogue management, and then discusses existing techniques of trend analysis for its application in user classification. As a further refinement and enhancement to prior work on ECA, this thesis research proposes a cohesive framework to integrate emotion-based facial animation with improved intention discovery. In addition, a machine learning technique is introduced to support sentiment analysis for the adjustment of policy design in POMDP-based dialogue management. It is anticipated that the proposed research work is going to improve the accuracy of intention discovery while reducing the length of dialogues.

 

Thesis Committee:

Internal Reader: Dr. Luis Rueda

External Reader: Dr. Gokul Bhandari

Advisor: Dr. Xiaobu Yuan

Chair:  Dr. Jessica Chen

Thesis Defense Announcement