With an explosion in the proliferation of user-generated content in communities, information overload is increasing and quality of readily available online content is deteriorating. There is an increasing need for intelligent systems that make use of implicit user generated knowledge in communities for community engagement. We describe our approach based on modeling user utterances in communities to proactively target the community for exchange of questions and answers. We envision a system that automatically encourages user engagement and participation by routing relevant conversations to users based on individual and community activity levels. In this paper, we analyze health forum conversations from WebMD, a popular health portal consumer site, and classify them in different acts of speech using Verbal Response Modes (VRM) theory. We describe our approach for modeling an intelligent community recommender to engage participants based on observations from our analysis.

Joint analysis of data from multiple sources has the potential to improve our understanding of the underlying structures in complex data sets. For instance, in restaurant recommendation systems, recommendations can be based on rating histories of customers. In addition to rating histories, customers' social networks (e.g., Facebook friendships) and restaurant categories information (e.g., Thai or Italian) can also be used to make better recommendations. The task of fusing data, however, is challenging since data sets can be incomplete and heterogeneous, i.e., data consist of both matrices, e.g., the person by person social network matrix or the restaurant by category matrix, and higher-order tensors, e.g., the "ratings" tensor of the form restaurant by meal by person. In this paper, we are particularly interested in fusing data sets with the goal of capturing their underlying latent structures. We formulate this problem as a coupled matrix and tensor factorization (CMTF) problem where heterogeneous data sets are modeled by fitting outer-product models to higher-order tensors and matrices in a coupled manner. Unlike traditional approaches solving this problem using alternating algorithms, we propose an all-at-once optimization approach called CMTF-OPT (CMTF-OPTimization), which is a gradient-based optimization approach for joint analysis of matrices and higher-order tensors. We also extend the algorithm to handle coupled incomplete data sets. Using numerical experiments, we demonstrate that the proposed all-at-once approach is more accurate than the alternating least squares approach.

The Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence was pleased to present the 2010 Fall Symposium Series, held Thursday through Saturday, November 11-13, at the Westin Arlington Gateway in Arlington, Virginia. The titles of the eight symposia are as follows: (1) Cognitive and Metacognitive Educational Systems; (2) Commonsense Knowledge; (3) Complex Adaptive Systems: Resilience, Robustness, and Evolvability; (4) Computational Models of Narrative; (5) Dialog with Robots; (6) Manifold Learning and Its Applications; (7) Proactive Assistant Agents ; and (8) Quantum Informatics for Cognitive, Social, and Semantic Processes. The highlights of each symposium are presented in this report.

We describe Cobot, a mixed initiative socio-semantic conversational search and recommendation system for finding health information. With Cobot, users can start a real time conversation about their health concerns. Cobot then connects relevant users together in the conversation also providing contextual recommendations relevant to the conversation. Conventional search engines and content portals provide a solitary search experience inundating the health information seeker with a hoard of information often confusing and frustrating them. Cobot brings relevant healthcare information directly or through other users without any search through natural language conversation.

The past decade has witnessed an increasing interest in the use of virtual coaches in healthcare. This paper describes a virtual coach to provide mindfulness meditation training, and the coaching support necessary to begin a regular practice. The coach is implemented as an embodied conversational character, and provides mindfulness training and coaching support via a web-based application. The coach is represented as a female character, capable of showing a variety of affective and conversational expressions, and interacts with the user via a mixed-initiative, text-based, natural language dialogue. The coach adapts both its facial expressions and the dialogue content to the user’s learning needs and motivational state. Findings from a pilot evaluation study indicate that the coach-based training is more effective in helping users establish a regular practice than self-administered training via written and audio materials. The paper concludes with an analysis of the coach features that contribute to these results, discussion of key challenges in affect-adaptive coaching, and plans for future work.

We have developed an automated counseling system in which clients interact with an embodied conversational People who could benefit from a positive change in health agent (Cassell 2000) that acts as a virtual counselor. To behavior form a large and variable population, with assist precontemplations and contemplators, we differences in individual characteristics and circumstances.

This article presents our work on building a virtual coach agent, called Dr. Vicky, and training environment (called the Virtual BNI Trainer, or VBT) for learning how to correctly talk with medical patients who have substance abuse issues. This work focuses on how to effectively design menu-based dialogue interactions for conversing with a virtual patient within the context of learning how to properly engage in such conversations according to the brief negotiated interview techniques we desire to train. Dr. Vicky also employs a model of student knowledge to influence the mediation strategies used in personalizing the training experience and guidance offered. The VBT is a prototype training application that will be used by medical students and practitioners within the Yale medical community in the future.

After a hospitalization, approximately 1 out of 5 patients will suffer from an adverse event, and one-third of these complications are preventable. Having a pharmacist follow-up with patients a few days after leaving the hospital has been shown to significantly reduce re-hospitalizations and adverse drug events. In this work, we describe our design for an Embodied Conversational Agent system for longitudinal, post-hospitalization follow-up. We discuss how best-practice follow-up interactions between patients and clinical pharmacists inform the design of our system, focusing on the strategies used by the pharmacist to detect and resolve issues that have occurred post-hospitalization.

Traditional machine-learned ranking systems for web search are often trained to capture stationary relevance of documents to queries, which has limited ability to track non-stationary user intention in a timely manner. In recency search, for instance, the relevance of documents to a query on breaking news often changes significantly over time, requiring effective adaptation to user intention. In this paper, we focus on recency search and study a number of algorithms to improve ranking results by leveraging user click feedback. Our contributions are three-fold. First, we use real search sessions collected in a random exploration bucket for \emph{reliable} offline evaluation of these algorithms, which provides an unbiased comparison across algorithms without online bucket tests. Second, we propose a re-ranking approach to improve search results for recency queries using user clicks. Third, our empirical comparison of a dozen algorithms on real-life search data suggests importance of a few algorithmic choices in these applications, including generalization across different query-document pairs, specialization to popular queries, and real-time adaptation of user clicks.

While a user's preference is directly reflected in the interactive choice process between her and the recommender, this wealth of information was not fully exploited for learning recommender models. In particular, existing collaborative filtering (CF) approaches take into account only the binary events of user actions but totally disregard the contexts in which users' decisions are made. In this paper, we propose Collaborative Competitive Filtering (CCF), a framework for learning user preferences by modeling the choice process in recommender systems. CCF employs a multiplicative latent factor model to characterize the dyadic utility function. But unlike CF, CCF models the user behavior of choices by encoding a local competition effect. In this way, CCF allows us to leverage dyadic data that was previously lumped together with missing data in existing CF models. We present two formulations and an efficient large scale optimization algorithm. Experiments on three real-world recommendation data sets demonstrate that CCF significantly outperforms standard CF approaches in both offline and online evaluations.