The idea of creating a virtual human that can converse seamlessly with a user seems daunting to most people who are just getting into artificial intelligence and looking into how utterly complex existing commercial systems are. And their fears aren't misled - larger systems that contain a plethora of data samples and an intricate network architecture, and are responsible for providing the highest quality home assistant system are very difficult to replicate. But, creating virtual assistants at a smaller level has already been simplified to allow virtually anyone to make their own conversational persona. Over the past decade, the University of Southern California's Institute for Creative Technologies has developed countless virtual personalities for a variety of reasons: The institute has been able to create the amount of virtual humans as they have because of the technology they developed titled'NPCEditor'. As the name implies, the program allows the team to edit an NPC, or non-player-character. Developed by research scientist Anton Leuski and lead professor of NLP David Traum, the software has been simplified enough so that it is incredibly easy to create a virtual human.

It uses statistical language-classification technology for mapping from a user's text input to system responses. NPCEditor provides a user-friendly editor for creating effective virtual humans quickly. It has been deployed as a part of various virtual human systems in several applications. Imagine talking to a computer system that looks and acts almost human -- it converses, understands, can rea son, and can exhibit emotion. As an example, recall such computer characters created by Hollywood moviemakers as the librarian in Time Machine, the holographic professor in I Robot, and of course, the holodeck characters in numer ous Star Trek: The Next Generation episodes.

We take a conversational character trained on a set of linked question-answer pairs authored by hand, and augment its training data by adding sets of question-answer pairs which are generated automatically from texts on different topics. The augmented characters can answer questions about the new topics, at the cost of some performance loss on questions about the topics that the original character was trained to answer.

See Leuski et al. (2006) and to the same question -- for example, "What Leuski and Traum (2008) for more details. is your name?" -- depending on who the interactor The final parameter is the classification threshold is looking at. NPCEditor's user interface allows the on the KL-divergence value: only answers that designer to define arbitrary annotation classes or score above the threshold value are returned from categories and specify which of these annotation the classifier. The threshold is determined by tuning categories should be used in classification.

We are proud to continue this tradition with the presentation of five articles from the Twenty Second IAAI conference that was held in Atlanta, Georgia, from July 11-14, 2010. We were especially honored to have Jay M. (Marty) Tenenbaum accept the Robert S. Engelmore Memorial Award for his exceptional contributions to AI in computer vision and manufacturing as well as his visionary role in the birth of electronic commerce. This issue of AI Magazine includes an article based on his lecture Cancer: A Computational Disease That AI Can Cure. In this article, Jay Tenenbaum and Jeff Shrager provide a personal view of their work in the development of an AIbased system that addresses the challenge of helping to find a cure for cancer. As a cancer survivor himself, Tenenbaum has a unique insight into the shortcomings of current approaches to treating this disease.

Augmenting word tokens with a phonetic representation, derived from a dictionary, improves the performance of a Natural Language Understanding component that interprets speech recognizer output: we observed a 5% to 7% reduction in errors across a wide range of response return rates. The best performance comes from mixture models incorporating both word and phone features. Since the phonetic representation is derived from a dictionary, the method can be applied easily without the need for integration with a specific speech recognizer. The method has similarities with autonomous (or bottom-up) psychological models of lexical access, where contextual information is not integrated at the stage of auditory perception but rather later.

NPCEditor is a system for building a natural language processing component for virtual humans capable of engaging a user in spoken dialog on a limited domain. It uses a statistical language classification technology for mapping from user's text input to system responses. NPCEditor provides a user-friendly editor for creating effective virtual humans quickly. It has been deployed as a part of various virtual human systems in several applications.