Pierrick Milhorat


2017

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Attentive listening system with backchanneling, response generation and flexible turn-taking
Divesh Lala | Pierrick Milhorat | Koji Inoue | Masanari Ishida | Katsuya Takanashi | Tatsuya Kawahara
Proceedings of the 18th Annual SIGdial Meeting on Discourse and Dialogue

Attentive listening systems are designed to let people, especially senior people, keep talking to maintain communication ability and mental health. This paper addresses key components of an attentive listening system which encourages users to talk smoothly. First, we introduce continuous prediction of end-of-utterances and generation of backchannels, rather than generating backchannels after end-point detection of utterances. This improves subjective evaluations of backchannels. Second, we propose an effective statement response mechanism which detects focus words and responds in the form of a question or partial repeat. This can be applied to any statement. Moreover, a flexible turn-taking mechanism is designed which uses backchannels or fillers when the turn-switch is ambiguous. These techniques are integrated into a humanoid robot to conduct attentive listening. We test the feasibility of the system in a pilot experiment and show that it can produce coherent dialogues during conversation.

2016

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Talking with ERICA, an autonomous android
Koji Inoue | Pierrick Milhorat | Divesh Lala | Tianyu Zhao | Tatsuya Kawahara
Proceedings of the 17th Annual Meeting of the Special Interest Group on Discourse and Dialogue

2014

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Designing Language Technology Applications: A Wizard of Oz Driven Prototyping Framework
Stephan Schlögl | Pierrick Milhorat | Gérard Chollet | Jérôme Boudy
Proceedings of the Demonstrations at the 14th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics

2013

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Multi-step Natural Language Understanding
Pierrick Milhorat | Stephan Schlögl | Gérard Chollet | Jérôme Boudy
Proceedings of the SIGDIAL 2013 Conference

2012

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Interactions sonores et vocales dans l’habitat (Acoustic Interaction At Home) [in French]
Pierrick Milhorat | Dan Istrate | Jérôme Boudy | Gérard Chollet
JEP-TALN-RECITAL 2012, Workshop ILADI 2012: Interactions Langagières pour personnes Agées Dans les habitats Intelligents (ILADI 2012: Language Interaction for Elderly in Smart Homes)