Hoorieh Afkari


2022

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A Machine Translation-Powered Chatbot for Public Administration
Dimitra Anastasiou | Anders Ruge | Radu Ion | Svetlana Segărceanu | George Suciu | Olivier Pedretti | Patrick Gratz | Hoorieh Afkari
Proceedings of the 23rd Annual Conference of the European Association for Machine Translation

This paper is about a multilingual chatbot developed for public administration within the CEF funded project ENRICH4ALL. We argue for multi-lingual chatbots empowered through MT and discuss the integration of the CEF eTranslation service in a chatbot solution.

2020

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“You move THIS!”: Annotation of Pointing Gestures on Tabletop Interfaces in Low Awareness Situations
Dimitra Anastasiou | Hoorieh Afkari | Valérie Maquil
Proceedings of LREC2020 Workshop "People in language, vision and the mind" (ONION2020)

This paper analyses pointing gestures during low awareness situations occurring in a collaborative problem-solving activity implemented on an interactive tabletop interface. Awareness is considered as crucial requirement to support fluid and natural collaboration. We focus on pointing gestures as strategy to maintain awareness. We describe the results from a user study with five groups, each group consisting of three participants, who were asked to solve a task collaboratively on a tabletop interface. The ideal problem-solving solution would have been, if the three participants had been fully aware of what their personal area is depicting and had communicated this properly to the peers. However, often some participants are hesitant due to lack of awareness, some other want to take the lead work or expedite the process, and therefore pointing gestures to others’ personal areas arise. Our results from analyzing a multimodal corpus of 168.68 minutes showed that in 95% of the cases, one user pointed to the personal area of the other, while in a few cases (3%) a user not only pointed, but also performed a touch gesture on the personal area of another user. In our study, the mean for such pointing gestures in low awareness situations per minute and for all groups was M=1.96, SD=0.58.