Natural language programming is a promising approach to enable end users to instruct new tasks for intelligent agents. However, our formative study found that end users would often use unclear, ambiguous or vague concepts when naturally instructing tasks in natural language, especially when specifying conditionals. Existing systems have limited support for letting the user teach agents new concepts or explaining unclear concepts. In this paper, we describe a new multi-modal domain-independent approach that combines natural language programming and programming-by-demonstration to allow users to first naturally describe tasks and associated conditions at a high level, and then collaborate with the agent to recursively resolve any ambiguities or vagueness through conversations and demonstrations. Users can also define new procedures and concepts by demonstrating and referring to contents within GUIs of existing mobile apps. We demonstrate this approach in PUMICE, an end-user programmable agent that implements this approach. A lab study with 10 users showed its usability. 
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                            A Multi-modal Approach to Concept Learning in Task Oriented Conversational Agents
                        
                    
    
            A major challenge in designing conversational agents is to handle unknown concepts in user utterances. This is particularly difficult for general-purpose task-oriented agents, as the unknown concepts and the tasks can be outside of the agent’s existing domain of knowledge. In this work, we propose a new multi-modal mixed-initiative approach towards this problem. Our agent Pumice guides the user to recursively explain unknown concepts through conversations, and to ground these concepts by demonstrating on the graphical user interfaces (GUIs) of existing third-party mobile apps. Pumice also supports the generalization of learned concepts to other different contexts and task domains. 
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                            - Award ID(s):
- 1814472
- PAR ID:
- 10160116
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- CHI 2019 Workshop on Conversational Agents: Acting on the Wave of Research and Development (CHI19convai)
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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