Meet EDGAR, a tutoring agent at MONSERRATE
Pedro Fialho, Luísa Coheur, Sérgio Curto, Pedro Cláudio, Ângela Costa, Alberto Abad, Hugo Meinedo, Isabel M. Trancoso · 2013
In this paper we describe a platform for embodied conversational agents with tutoring goals, which takes as input written and spoken questions and outputs answers in both forms. The platform is developed within a game environment, and currently allows speech recognition and synthesis in Portuguese, English and Spanish. In this paper we focus on its understanding component that supports in-domain interactions, and also small talk. Most indomain interactions are answered using different similarity metrics, which compare the perceived utterances with questions/sentences in the agent’s knowledge base; small-talk capabilities are mainly due to AIML, a language largely used by the chatbots ’ community. In this paper we also introduce EDGAR, the butler of MONSERRATE, which was developed in the aforementioned platform, and that answers tourists ’ questions about MONSER-RATE. 1