Job interview simulation with a virtual agents aims at improving people's social skills and supporting professional inclusion. In such simulators, the virtual agent must be capable of representing and reasoning about the user's mental state based on social cues that inform the system about his her affects and social attitude. In this paper, we propose a formal model of Theory of Mind (ToM) for virtual agent in the context of human-agent interaction that focuses on the affective dimension. It relies on a hybrid ToM that combines the two major paradigms of the domain. Our framework is based on modal logic and inference rules about the mental states, emotions and social relations of both actors. Finally, we present preliminary results regarding the impact of such a model on natural interaction in the context of job interviews simulation.
Existing computational ToM models either imply a choice between the TT and ST theories ( @cite_18 that relies on a ST approach, or @cite_28 and @cite_1 that position in the TT) or implement them separately as in @cite_17 . In our work, we propose a hybrid approach that relies on theory-theory to model the agent's mental states and commonsense rules, but also on simulation-theory to others' perspective by projecting attributed mental states on its own inference engine. Both models are integrated in the same reasoner.
@cite_28 @cite_18 @cite_1 @cite_17
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A new class of visuomotor neuron has been recently discovered in the monkeys premotor cortex: mirror neurons. These neurons respond both when a particular action is performed by the recorded monkey and when the same action, performed by another individual, is observed. Mirror neurons appear to form a cortical system matching observation and execution of goal-related motor actions. Experimental evidence suggests that a similar matching system also exists in humans. What might be the functional role of this matching system? One possible function is to enable an organism to detect certain mental states of observed conspecifics. This function might be part of, or a precursor to, a more general mind-reading ability. Two different accounts of mindreading have been suggested. According to theory theory, mental states are represented as inferred posits of a naive theory. According to simulation theory, other peoples mental states are represented by adopting their perspective: by tracking or matching their states with resonant states of ones own. The activity of mirror neurons, and the fact that observers undergo motor facilitation in the same muscular groups as those utilized by target agents, are findings that accord well with simulation theory but would not be predicted by theory theory. This work is a follow-up to our previous work "A numerical approach related to defect-type theories for some weakly random problems in homogenization" (preprint available on this archive). It extends and complements, both theoretically and experimentally, the results presented there. Under consideration is the homogenization of a model of a weakly random heterogeneous material. The material consists of a reference periodic material randomly perturbed by another periodic material, so that its homogenized behavior is close to that of the reference material. We consider laws for the random perturbations more general than in our previous work cited above. We prove the validity of an asymptotic expansion in a certain class of settings. We also extend the formal approach introduced in our former work. Our perturbative approach shares common features with a defect-type theory of solid state physics. The computational efficiency of the approach is demonstrated. Abstract Human self-consciousness as the metarepresentation of ones own mental states and the so-called theory of mind (TOM) capacity, which requires the ability to model the mental states of others, are closely related higher cognitive functions. We address here the issue of whether taking the self-perspective (SELF) or modeling the mind of someone else (TOM) employ the same or differential neural mechanisms. A TOM paradigm was used and extended to include stimulus material that involved TOM and SELF capacities in a two-way factorial design. A behavioral study in 42 healthy volunteers showed that TOM and SELF induced differential states of mind: subjects assigned correctly first or third person pronouns when providing responses to the stimuli. Following the behavioral study, we used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) in eight healthy, right-handed males to study the common and differential neural mechanisms underlying TOM and SELF. The main factor TOM led to increased neural activity in the anterior cingulate cortex and left temporopolar cortex. The main factor SELF led to increased neural activity in the right temporopariet al junction and in the anterior cingulate cortex. A significant interaction of both factors TOM and SELF was observed in the right prefrontal cortex. These divergent neural activations in response to TOM and SELF suggest that these important differential mental capacities of human self-consciousness are implemented at least in part in distinct brain regions. Abstract Documents in computer-readable form can be used to provide information about other documents, i.e. those they cite. To do this efficiently requires procedures for computer recognition of citing statements. This is not easy, especially for multi-sentence citing statements. Computer recognition procedures have been developed which are accurate to the following extent: 73 of the words in statements selected by computer procedures as being citing statements are words which are correctly attributable to the corresponding documents. The retrieval effectiveness of computer-recognized citing statements was tested in the following way. First, for eight retrieval requests in inorganiic chemistry, average recall by search of Chemical Abstracts Service indexing and Chemical Abstracts abstract text words was found to be 50 . Words from citing statements referring to the papers to be retrieved were then added to the index terms and abstract words as additional access points, and searching was repeated. Average recall increased to 70 . Only words from citing statements published within a year of the cited papers were used. The retrieval effect of citing statement words alone (published within a year) without index or abstract terms was the following: average recall was 40 . When just the words of the titles of the cited papers were added to those citing statement words, average recall increased to 50 .