Memorability of conversations and prosody

EEMCS Master’s Project Open-Call

Prosody has been long known to affect our perception of speech. It's tough to concentrate on a monotonic lecture. On the other hand, a lecturer with varying prosody is more comfortable to follow. An engaging speaker helps their listeners keep alert and memorise the speech's content (Strangert & Gustafson 2008) by stressing the critical words, pausing when needed, and expressing excitement about the topic. The relation between prosody and short-term memory has been studied extensively (e.g. Rodero 2015) as has the relationship to syntactic difficulty (Rosner et al. 2003). However, these studies did not investigate the effect on long-term memory and didn't differentiate between different information types. In conversational agents research, prosody has been shown to increase user overall engagement and satisfaction (Chaoi & Agichtein 2020), but the question of memory facilitation seems to remain uncovered. In this thesis project, you will investigate whether prosody affects the long-term memorisation of the information communicated by a conversational agent. Another question that can be asked is memorisation of what kind of information gets affected by prosody the most.

Supervision: Catharine Oertel, Maria Tsfasman, Interactive Intelligence

Memorability of conversations: factors and automatic prediction

EEMCS Master’s Project Open-Call

Humans have a selective memory. They are good at capturing the most critical moments ofa conversation but are generally incapable of remembering every detail. One way in whichartificial agents can become more socially-aware is by modelling how humans rememberconversations. The first step towards understanding how humans choose what to rememberis by studying the human encoding process and more explicitly how sensory information isfiltered and stored in memory. Memorability has been studied from a computer vision pointof view [3, 4] also investigating multimodal aspects [1]. However, in these studies, aconversational setting has widely been ignored.

Supervision: Catharine Oertel, Maria Tsfasman, Interactive Intelligence

Developing Conversational AI for Design Settings: how to use conversational agents for increasing your creativity

EEMCS Master’s Project Open-Call

Creativity and innovative thinking are highly desired skills in today's society individually and also in the context of teamwork. One essential part of creativity is idea generation where people explore a given problem's solution space. The most known techniques for idea generation include generating ideas from memory and by direct association (inventory and association), identifying and breaking common assumptions (provocative) or using analogies (confrontative). In human-human interaction, these process, however, is often burdened by social factors such as criticism, dominance, judgment, comparison - to name a few. Could technology help here?

Supervision: Catharine Oertel, Joanna Mania, Interactive Intelligence