Multiperspective Multimodal Dialogue
The goal of METALOGUE was to produce a multimodal dialogue system that is able to implement an interactive behaviour that seems natural to users and is flexible enough to exploit the full potential of multimodal interaction. It has been achieved by understanding, controlling and manipulating system’s own and users’ cognitive processes. The new dialogue manager incorporates a cognitive model based on metacognitive skills which enables planning and deployment of appropriate dialogue strategies. The system is able to monitor both its own and users’ interactive performance, reason about the dialogue progress, guess the users’ knowledge and intentions, and thereby adapt and regulate the dialogue behaviour over time.
The metacognitive capabilities of the METALOGUE system are based on a state-of-the-art approach incorporating multitasking and transfer of knowledge among skills. The models are implemented in ACT-R, providing a general framework of metacognitive skills.
METALOGUE research focuses on educational and coaching situations where negotiation skills play a key role in the decision-making processes. Components and algorithms are developed, tested and integrated into a prototype platform, which provide learners with a rich and interactive environment that will help to develop metacognitive skills, support motivation, and stimulate creativity and responsibility in the decision making and argumentation process. The METALOGUE system produced virtual agents capable of engaging in natural interaction through combinations of spoken language (English) and gestures, mimicry and body language. The virtual agent – META – is engaged in the interaction, see TED talk showcasing META at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n1ARQsdNvmI
The METALOGUE system has been successfully deployed in social educational contexts for training young entrepreneurs and active citizens (Youth Parliament) and is positively evaluated at the Hellenic Parliament premises in September 2017. 31 young people (14 to 25 years old) from several Greek schools participated in Athens in two evaluation rounds. 12 UdS students interacted with META in Saarbrücken. The usability perception questionnaire can be found here
Use case for business education context has been also designed, i.e. for training call centre employees to successfully handle their customers.
The METALOGUE project (www.metalogue.eu) has been successfully completed in October 2016.
For inquiries regarding the Metalogue project, please contact: Dr. Volha Petukhova, v.petukhova@lsv.uni-saarland.de
