In this contribution, it is suggested that argumentation theories may offer the tools to do so. More specifically, the pragmadialectical theory of argumentation (van Eemeren and Grootendorst 1992; 2004) is proposed as a solid instrument for analyzing and evaluating argumentation in consultation, as it not only provides a set of reasonableness criteria for argumentative conduct but also can account for arguers' need to effectively tailor argumentative messages to their recipients. The instrumental value of pragma-dialectics in the field of automated argument selection will be elucidated by means of a case study concerning antibiotics. In doing so, this contribution is closely connected to the paper by Rubinelli, Wierda, Labrie, and O'Keefe (AAAI Spring Symposium 2011) and provides an exploratory investigation of the advantages of a pragma-dialectical approach to the conceptual design of automated health communication systems and autonomous health promotion.

Detecting and characterizing emerging topics of discussion and consumer trends through analysis of Internet data is of great interest to businesses. This paper considers the problem of monitoring the Web to spot emerging memes – distinctive phrases which act as “tracers” for topics – as a means of early detection of new topics and trends. We present a novel methodology for predicting which memes will propagate widely, appearing in hundreds or thousands of blog posts, and which will not, thereby enabling discovery of significant topics. We begin by identifying measurables which should be predictive of meme success. Interestingly, these metrics are not those traditionally used for such prediction but instead are subtle measures of meme dynamics. These metrics form the basis for learning a classifier which predicts, for a given meme, whether or not it will propagate widely. The utility of the prediction methodology is demonstrated through analysis of a sample of 200 memes which emerged online during the second half of 2008.

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.

The classic dualism offered in Descartes' The English language is rich with words and phrases with Meditations on First Philosophy (1641) views a person as meaning that is grounded in our commonsense theories of having both a physical body and a nonphysical mind.

An intelligent system of the future should make its user feel comfortable, which is impossible without understanding context they coexist in. However, our past research did not treat language information as a part of the context a robot works in, and data about reasons why the user had made his decisions was not obtained. Therefore, we decided to utilize the Web as a knowledge source to discover context information that could suggest a robot's behavior when it acquires verbal information from its user or users. By comparing user utterances (blogs, Twitter or Facebook entries, not direct orders) with other people's written experiences (mostly blogs), a system can judge whether it is a situation in which the robot can perform or improve its performance. In this paper we introduce several methods that can be applied to a simple floor-cleaning robot. We describe basic experiments showing that text processing is helpful when dealing with multiple users who are not willing to give rich feedback. For example, we describe a method for finding usual reasons for cleaning on the Web by using Okapi BM25 to extract feature words from sentences retrieved by the query word "cleaning". Then, we introduce our ideas for dealing with conflicts of interest in multiuser environments and possible methods for avoiding such conflicts by achieving better situation understanding. Also, an emotion recognizer for guessing user needs and moods and a method to calculate situation naturalness are described.

Spoken language is an important and natural way for people to communicate with computers. Nonetheless, habitable, reliable, and efficient human-machine dialogue remains difficult to achieve. This paper describes a multi-threaded semi-synchronous architecture for spoken dialogue systems. The focus here is on its utterance interpretation module. Unlike most architectures for spoken dialogue systems, this new one is designed to be robust to noisy speech recognition through earlier reliance on context, a mixture of rationales for interpretation, and fine-grained use of confidence measures. We report here on a pilot study that demonstrates its robust understanding of users’ objectives, and we compare it with our earlier spoken dialogue system implemented in a traditional pipeline architecture. Substantial improvements appear at all tested levels of recognizer performance.

The challenges of effective health risk communication are well known. This paper provides pointers to the health communication literature that discuss these problems. Tailoring printed information, visual displays, and interactive multimedia have been proposed in the health communication literature as promising approaches. On-line risk communication applications are increasing on the internet. However, potential effectiveness of applications using conventional computer technology is limited. We propose that use of artificial intelligence, building upon research in Intelligent Tutoring Systems, might be able to overcome these limitations.

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.

Inferring the sentiment of social media content, for instance blog postings or online product reviews, is both of great interest to businesses and technically challenging to accomplish. This paper presents two computational methods for estimating social media sentiment which address the challenges associated with Web-based analysis. Each method formulates the task as one of text classification, models the data as a bipartite graph of documents and words, and assumes that only limited prior information is available regarding the sentiment orientation of any of the documents or words of interest. The first algorithm is a semi-supervised sentiment classifier which combines knowledge of the sentiment labels for a few documents and words with information present in unlabeled data, which is abundant online. The second algorithm assumes existence of a set of labeled documents in a domain related to the domain of interest, and leverages these data to estimate sentiment in the target domain. We demonstrate the utility of the proposed methods by showing they outperform several standard methods for the task of inferring the sentiment of online reviews of movies, electronics products, and kitchen appliances. Additionally, we illustrate the potential of the methods for multilingual business informatics through a case study involving estimation of Indonesian public opinion regarding the July 2009 Jakarta hotel bombings.

Research in open-domain commonsense reasoning has been hindered by the lack of evaluation metrics for judging progress and comparing alternative approaches. Taking inspiration from large-scale question sets used in natural language processing research, we authored one thousand English-language questions that directly assess commonsense causal reasoning, called the Choice Of Plausible Alternatives (COPA) evaluation. Using a forced-choice format, each question gives a premise and two plausible causes or effects, where the correct choice is the alternative that is more plausible than the other. This paper describes the authoring methodology that we used to develop a validated question set with sufficient breadth to advance open-domain commonsense reasoning research. We discuss the design decisions made during the authoring process, and explain how these decisions will affect the design of high-scoring systems. We also present the performance of multiple baseline approaches that use statistical natural language processing techniques, establishing initial benchmarks for future systems.