VCA: An Experiment with a Multiparty Virtual Chat Agent
Samira Shaikh, Tomek Strzalkowski, Sarah Taylor, Nick Webb · 2010
The purpose of this research was to advance the understanding of the behavior of small groups in online chat rooms. The research was conducted using Internet chat data collected through planned exercises with recruited participants. Analysis of the collected data led to construction of preliminary models of social behavior in online discourse. Some of these models, e.g., how to effectively change the topic of conversation, were subsequently implemented into an automated Virtual Chat Agent (VCA) prototype. VCA has been demonstrated to perform effectively and convincingly in Internet conversation in multiparty chat environments. 1