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Other Applications

We are considering a variety of applications of our system that follow the mediation paradigm. The paradigm does not necessitate the computer to make any hard time-critical decisions which influence the rate of the interaction. The interaction is taking place between human participants while the computer is monitoring the conversation evaluating its quality and delivering assistance when necessary. The assistance can be provided in the form of a relevant piece of information (automatic contextual retrieval of documents from a database, submitting a query to a web search engine, etc.) or a communication assistance (delivering conversation-stimulating prompts or questions, directing the flow of the conversation, detecting off-topic discussions at a meeting, etc.).

One example of the contextual information assistance could be a system that displays a list of INS regulations relevant to the current topic and keywords detected during an INS interview.

An interesting perspective is provided by considering a marriage counseling session. At a risk of over-simplification, we can argue that the role of the marriage counselor is to provide the necessary degree of feedback to encourage the conversation between partners. We attempt to provide a system that is reminiscent of ``Eliza'' which does not interrupt and does not require question-answer type of communication. When the conversation is progressing it simply steps aside.



 
next up previous
Next: Conversational Style Up: Tracking Conversational Context for Previous: Experiments
Tony Jebara
2000-02-24