Programmer/Research Assistant Intern 0931
January 08, 2009
Project Name
Development of Authoring tools for Conversational Characters
Project Description
The ICT Virtual Human project is pushing the state of the art in technologies for modeling natural language dialogue, emotion reasoning, and non-verbal communication for animated characters. Recently we have started developing tools for creating new characters to use these abilities to interact with people and other virtual characters. This project will continue the development of these tools to make domain creation and development easier for non-computer scientists. The tools will be evaluated by using them to create extended and new domains for our virtual humans.
Job Description
The intern will work with research staff and graduate students to design and develop the tools and create new domain aspects. The tools that we anticipate the intern will work on are:
- A visualization tool for semantic representations in the form of attribute value-matrices that makes it easy to inspect, create, modify, and copy these structures.
- Visualization tools for dialogue information state
- An ability to rapidly add new dialogue act types to an existing dialogue act taxonomy and add handlers for updating the dialogue state appropriately when these speech acts are performed
- An ability to import/export semantic objects from one domain to another functionality
- Debugging tools.
Skill set:
- Strong Java programming skills (especially Swing GUI programming) and XML
- Natural Language processing (especially semantics and dialogue) background is a plus.