E-raamat: Conversational Informatics: An Engineering Approach

This discipline investigates human behavior with the goal of designing machines capable of interacting with them in a conversational manner, but the linguists, psychologists and human-computer specialists involved were once isolated from each other. Advancements in science and technology have made it possible to perform interdisciplinary research that integrates scientific approaches, so these 21 papers cover a range of such interdisciplinary approaches and projects, including work in artifacts, contents, environment design, measurement analysis, and modeling. Topics include conversation agents and the construction of humorous acts, the inclusion of emotion and politeness, nonverbal signals and gestures, visual feedback in dialogues, facial gestures, automatic text in the conversation process, video content acquisition and editing, video personalization, use of ubiquitous sensors in the environment, real-time human proxies, lecture archiving, modeling and analysis of human conversation, embodied synchrony, modeling communication atmosphere, online community interaction analysis, and mutual adaptation in human-computer interfaces. Annotation ©2008 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

Conversational informatics investigates human behaviour with a view to designing conversational artifacts capable of interacting with humans in a conversational fashion. It spans a broad array of topics including linguistics, psychology and human-computer interaction. Until recently research in such areas has been carried out in isolation, with no attempt made to connect the various disciplines. Advancements in science and technology have changed this.

Conversational Informatics provides an interdisciplinary introduction to conversational informatics and places emphasis upon the integration of scientific approaches to achieve engineering goals and to advance further understanding of conversation.

It features a collection of surveys structured around four prominent research areas: conversational artifacts, conversational contents, conversation environment design and conversation measurement, analysis and modelling

• Conversational artifacts shows how synthetic characters or intelligent robots use eye gaze, gestures and other non-verbal communicators to interact.
• Conversational contents looks at developing techniques for acquiring, editing, distributing and utilising the contents that are produced and consumed in conversation.
• Conversation environment design explains techniques for creating intelligent virtual environments and for representing individuals within a virtual environment by monitoring and reproducing their non-verbal conversational behaviour.
• Conversation measurement, analysis and modelling demonstrate how conversational behaviour can be measured and analyzed. 

Conversational Informatics will be an invaluable resource for postgraduate students and researchers in Computer Science and Electrical Engineering as well as engineers and developers working in the field of automation, robotics and agents technology.