Instituto de Engenharia de Sistemas e Computadores, Investigação e Desenvolvimento em Lisboa

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Modeling students’ behavioral engagement through different in-class behavior styles

Publication . Gomes, Samuel; Costa, Luis; Martinho, Carlos; Dias, João; Xexéo, Geraldo; Moura Santos, Ana

Background The growing necessity of providing better education, notably through the development of Adaptive Learning Systems (ALSs), leveraged the study of several psychological constructs to accurately characterize learners. A concept extensively studied in education is engagement, a multidimensional construct encompassing behavioral expression and motivational backgrounds. This metric can be used to not only guide certain pedagogic methodologies, but also to endow systems with the right tutoring techniques. As such, this article aims to inspire improved teaching styles and automatic learning systems, by experimentally verifying the influence of in-class behaviors in students’ engagement. Results Over 16 math lessons, the occurrence of students’ and instructors’ behaviors, alongside students’ engagement estimates, were recorded using the COPUS observation protocol. After behavior-profiling the classes deploying such lessons, significant linear models were computed to relate the frequency of the students’ or instructors’ behaviors with the students’ engagement at different in-class periods. The models revealed a positive relation of students’ initial individual thinking and later group activity participation with their collective engagement, as well as a positive engagement relation with the later application of instructor’s strategies such as giving feedback and moving through class, guiding on-going work. Conclusions The results suggest the benefit of applying a workshop-like learning process, providing more individual explanations and feedback at the beginning of an interaction, leaving collective feedback and students’ guidance of on-going work for later on. Based on the relations suggested by our models, several guidelines for developing ALSs are proposed, and a practical illustrative example is formulated.

2023-03-11Journal article

Open Access

FAtiMA toolkit: toward an accessible tool for the development of socio-emotional agents

Publication . Mascarenhas, Samuel; Guimarães, Manuel; Prada, Rui; Santos, Pedro A.; Dias, João; Paiva, Ana

More than a decade has passed since the development of FearNot!, an application designed to help children deal with bullying through role-playing with virtual characters. It was also the application that led to the creation of FAtiMA, an affective agent architecture for creating autonomous characters that can evoke empathic responses. In this article, we describe the FAtiMA Toolkit, a collection of open-source tools that is designed to help researchers, game developers, and roboticists incorporate a computational model of emotion and decision-making in their work. The toolkit was developed with the goal of making FAtiMA more accessible, easier to incorporate into different projects, and more flexible in its capabilities for human-agent interaction, based upon the experience gathered over the years across different virtual environments and human-robot interaction scenarios. As a result, this work makes several different contributions to the field of Agent-Based Architectures. More precisely, the FAtiMA Toolkit’s library-based design allows developers to easily integrate it with other frameworks, its meta-cognitive model affords different internal reasoners and affective components, and its explicit dialogue structure gives control to the author even within highly complex scenarios. To demonstrate the use of the FAtiMA Toolkit, several different use cases where the toolkit was successfully applied are described and discussed.

2022Journal article

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The influence of reward on the social valence of interactions

Publication . Alves, Tomas; Gomes, Samuel; Dias, João; Martinho, Carlos

Throughout the years, social norms have been promoted as an informal enforcement mechanism for achieving beneficial collective outcomes. Among the most used methods to foster interactions, framing the context of a situation or setting in-game rules have shown strong results as mediators on how an individual interacts with their peers. Nevertheless, we found that there is a lack of research regarding the use of incentives such as scores to promote social interactions differing in valence. Weighing how incentives influence in-game behavior, we propose the use of rewards to promote interactions varying in valence, i.e. positive or negative, in a two-player scenario. To do so, we defined social valence as a continuous scale with two poles represented by Complicate and Help. Then, we performed user tests where participants where asked to play a game with two reward-based systems to test on whether the scoring system influenced the social interaction valence. The results indicate that the developed reward-based systems were able to foster interactions diverging in social valence scores, providing insights on how factors such as incentives overlap individual's established social norms. These findings empower game developers and designers with a low-cost and effective policy tool that is able to promote in-game behavior changes.

2020Conference object

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Linguistic resources for paraphrase generation in portuguese: a lexicon-grammar approach

Publication . Barreiro, Anabela; Mota, Cristina; Baptista, Jorge; Chacoto, Lucília; Carvalho, Paula

This paper presents a new linguistic resource for the generation of paraphrases in Portuguese, based on the lexicon-grammar framework. The resource components include: (i) a lexicon-grammar based dictionary of 2100 predicate nouns co-occurring with the support verb ser de 'be of', such as in ser de uma ajuda inestimavel 'be of invaluable help'; (ii) a lexicon-grammar based dictionary of 6000 predicate nouns co-occurring with the support verb fazer 'do' or 'make', such as in fazer uma comparacao 'make a comparison'; and (iii) a lexicon-grammar based dictionary of about 5000 human intransitive adjectives co-occurring with the copula verbs ser and/or estar 'be', such as in ser simpatico 'be kind' or estar entusiasmado 'be enthusiastic'. A set of local grammars explore the properties described in linguistic resources, enabling a variety of text transformation tasks for paraphrasing applications. The paper highlights the different complementary and synergistic components and integration efforts, and presents some preliminary evaluation results on the inclusion of such resources in the eSPERTo paraphrase generation system.

2022Journal article

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Dual critic conditional wasserstein gAN for height-map generation

Publication . Ramos, Nuno; Santos, Pedro; Dias, João

Traditionally, video-game maps are either made by hand, requiring many man-hours to produce good results, or made using Procedural Content Generation (PCG) techniques, which rely on a predetermined algorithm to generate every feature of the map. More recent studies have tried an approach using Deep Learning algorithms, which have their own limitations, in particular taking away the creative freedom of the designers. To circumvent this problem we propose a system that transforms low fidelity sketches into realistic height-maps through a Deep Learning model we call the Dual Critic Conditional Wasserstein GAN (DCCWGAN), thus providing high visual quality without removing control from the user. The presented system is capable of producing images that resemble the received input, and a user study with 79 participants showed that observers are not able to distinguish between earth-based height-map images and the images generated by our system.

2023Journal article

Open Access