MARINA: A Conversational Agent

The idea that a system might hold an intelligent conversation with a
human has been long an important aspect of research in artificial intelligence.
Several programs have been written accomplishing different aspects of
these conversational agents. At the same time, linguistic theory has
identified several characteristics of dialogue modeling that need to be
implemented if any conversational agent is to mimic human dialogues
successfully.

In this talk, I will present a conversational agent named MARINA which is
being developed at the CRL. I will show how it combines finite state
automata (FSA) driven dialogues with a higher level engine that communicates
with human users as well as other agents. This higher level engine
compensates for some of the rigidity produced by the FSA. I will also
present some of the properties in dialogue modeling and how these are
being addressed by MARINA.