No abstract

We present the design of an online social skills development interface for teenagers with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). The interface is intended to enable private conversation practice anywhere, anytime using a web-browser. Users converse informally with a virtual agent, receiving feedback on nonverbal cues in realtime, and summary feedback. The prototype was developed in consultation with an expert UX designer, two psychologists, and a pediatrician. Using the data from 47 individuals, feedback and dialogue generation were automated using a hidden Markov model and a schema-driven dialogue manager capable of handling multi-topic conversations. We conducted a study with nine high-functioning ASD teenagers. Through a thematic analysis of post-experiment interviews, identified several key design considerations, notably: 1) Users should be fully briefed at the outset about the purpose and limitations of the system, to avoid unrealistic expectations. 2) An interface should incorporate positive acknowledgment of behavior change. 3) Realistic appearance of a virtual agent and responsiveness are important in engaging users. 4) Conversation personalization, for instance in prompting laconic users for more input and reciprocal questions, would help the teenagers engage for longer terms and increase the system's utility. CCS CONCEPTS • Human-centered computing → Empirical studies in HCI .

As one attack on the "knowledge acquisition bottleneck", we are attempting to exploit a largely untapped source of general knowledge in texts, lying at a level beneath the explicit assertional content. This knowledge consists of relationships implied to be possible in the world, or, under certain conditions, implied to be normal or commonplace in the world. The goal of the work reported is to derive such general world knowledge (initially, from Penn Treebank corpora) in two stages: first, we derive general "possibilistic" propositions from noun phrases and clauses; then we try to derive stronger generalizations, based on the nature and statistical distribution of the possibilistic claims obtained in the first phase. Here we report preliminary results of the first phase, which indicate the feasibility of our project, and its likely limitations.

No abstract

No abstract