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Conversational agents designed to interact through natural language are often imbued with human-like personalities. At times, the agent might also have a distinct persona with traits such as gender, age, or a backstory. Designing such personality or persona for conversational agents has become a common design practice. In this work, we review the emerging literature on designing agent persona or personality, and reflect on these approaches, along with the personas that are created for common conversational agents. We discuss open questions with regards to three aspects: meeting user needs, the ethics of deception, and reinforcing social stereotypes through conversational agents. We hope this work can provoke researchers and practitioners to critically reflect on their approach for designing personality or persona of conversational agents.
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Affect and Personality: Ramifications of Modeling (Non-)Directionality in Dynamic Network Models
Abstract. The use of dynamic network models has grown in recent years. These models allow researchers to capture both lagged and contemporaneous effects in longitudinal data typically as variations, reformulations, or extensions of the standard vector autoregressive (VAR) models. To date, many of these dynamic networks have not been explicitly compared to one another. We compare three popular dynamic network approaches – GIMME, uSEM, and LASSO gVAR – in terms of their differences in modeling assumptions, estimation procedures, statistical properties based on a Monte Carlo simulation, and implications for affect and personality researchers. We found that all three dynamic network approaches provided yielded group-level empirical results in partial support of affect and personality theories. However, individual-level results revealed a great deal of heterogeneity across approaches and participants. Reasons for discrepancies are discussed alongside these approaches’ respective strengths and limitations.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1806874
- PAR ID:
- 10290505
- Publisher / Repository:
- Hogrefe Publishing Corp.
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- European Journal of Psychological Assessment
- Volume:
- 36
- Issue:
- 6
- ISSN:
- 1015-5759
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 1009 to 1023
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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