Social Learning for Intelligent Characters

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Publications

Prompting for socially intelligent agents with chatGPT

Publication . Antunes, Ana; Campos, Joana; Guimarães, Manuel; Dias, João; Santos, Pedro A.

Socially Intelligent Agents (SIAs) have become increasingly popular in various contexts, including education and entertainment. However, creating complex social scenarios tailored to a designer's specific goals remains a significant challenge. The authoring burden can be substantial, limiting the potential of SIAs to deliver rich, engaging experiences. In this work, we propose leveraging the extensive knowledge stored within Large Language Models and use theory-driven prompting to extract social practices and identify appropriate social affordances for a scenario description. Our prompting approach aims to guide the system into considering the essential components (beliefs and desires) necessary to produce intentions, actions, and emotions(1). Results show that our approach produces large amounts of accurate and new information that can add value to the scenario. However, the process can introduce inaccuracies without human supervision.

2023Conference object

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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MHeVA - mental health virtual assistant for high education students

Publication . Antunes, André; Guimarães, Manuel; Santos, Pedro A.; Dias, João; Boura, Carla; Campos, Joana

Current Higher Education Institutions' mental health support systems lack the capabilities to cope with the growing need and demand for mental health support from students. We introduce MHeVA - Mental Health Virtual Assistant - which was designed with the goal of creating an intelligent virtual agent that could serve as a first-line diagnostic-aid tool for mental health services across universities and faculties. Students interact with the agent which attempts to establish rapport and promotes disclosure through mental health state evaluation questions. In addition to this, MHeVA has the ability to assess self-reported anxiety levels, provide health improvement tips and flag the most severe cases. In order to evaluate the agent's effectiveness, a user study was conducted that measured self-disclosure, rapport building, anxiety levels and stigma mitigation. Our findings suggest that MHeVA was able to elicit self-disclosure in higher education students and achieved high levels of acceptance and engagement. The work presented further supports the potential benefits of using IVAs to encourage self-disclosure and to be integrated into existing mental health care systems.

2023Conference object

Open Access