The senior companion: a semantic web dialogue system

ABSTRACT

The Senior Companion (SC) is a fully implemented Windows application intended for intermittent use by one user only (a senior citizen) over potentially many years. The thinking behind the SC is to make a device that will give its owner comfort, company, entertainment, and some practical functions. The SC will typically be installed at home, either as an application on a personal computer, or on a dedicated device (like a Chumby) or an intelligent coffee table (like Microsoft's Surface). By means of multimodal input and output, and a graphical interface, the SC provides its 'owner' with different functionalities, which currently include:

• conversing with the user about his personal photos

• learning about the user, user's family, and life history

• telling the user jokes

• reading the news (via RSS feed from the internet)

REFERENCES

• 1: H. Cunningham, D. Maynard, K. Bontcheva, and V. Tablan. GATE: A framework and graphical development environment for robust NLP tools and applications, 2002. In Proc. 40th Anniversary Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL).
• 2: O. Lemon, A. Bracey, A. Gruenstein, and S. Peters. The WITAS multimodal dialogue system, 2003. In Proc. Eurospeech 2003.
• 3: Y. Wilks. Artificial companions, 2005. Interdisciplinary Science Reviews, June, Vol. 30, pp. 145--152.

INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  H. Information Systems
  H.5 INFORMATION INTERFACES AND PRESENTATION (I.7)
      H.5.3 Group and Organization Interfaces
          Subjects: Web-based interaction

Additional Classification:
  I. Computing Methodologies
  I.2 ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
        I.2.11 Distributed Artificial Intelligence
            Subjects: Coherence and coordination
      I.2.4 Knowledge Representation Formalisms and Methods
          Subjects: Semantic networks; Representations (procedural and rule-based)
      I.2.6 Learning

General Terms:
Algorithms, Design, Management, Theory