Overview of Awarded Papers: The 21st Annual Conference of JSAI

摘要

This chapter features seven awarded papers, selected from JSAI 2007 - the 21st annual conference of Japanese Society for Artificial Intelligence. These awarded papers are truly excellent, as they were chosen out of 335 papers, with the selection rate just about two per cent, and the selection involved approximately ninety reviewers. The selection rate was smaller than usual years that used to be three to four per cent. Synopses of the seven papers follow, with short comments for the award. Nakano et al. consider a probabilistic model of fine-grained timing dependencies among multimodal communication behaviors (direct manipulation and speech) between an animated agent and its user. There model quite accurately judges whether the user understand the agent's utterances and predicts user's successful direct manipulation. It is valuable to suggest that the model is useful in estimating user's understanding and can be applied to determining the next action of an agent.