Jose Varias


2018

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A Bilingual Interactive Human Avatar Dialogue System
Dana Abu Ali | Muaz Ahmad | Hayat Al Hassan | Paula Dozsa | Ming Hu | Jose Varias | Nizar Habash
Proceedings of the 19th Annual SIGdial Meeting on Discourse and Dialogue

This demonstration paper presents a bilingual (Arabic-English) interactive human avatar dialogue system. The system is named TOIA (time-offset interaction application), as it simulates face-to-face conversations between humans using digital human avatars recorded in the past. TOIA is a conversational agent, similar to a chat bot, except that it is based on an actual human being and can be used to preserve and tell stories. The system is designed to allow anybody, simply using a laptop, to create an avatar of themselves, thus facilitating cross-cultural and cross-generational sharing of narratives to wider audiences. The system currently supports monolingual and cross-lingual dialogues in Arabic and English, but can be extended to other languages.