Abstract
To many people, philosophy seems to be a difficult and daunting subject. Our research seeks to make the esoteric philosophical ideas and concepts more accessible to people in the modern world, and make philosophy learning an entertaining activity by allowing people to directly interact with virtual philosophers from the past. With Artificial Intelligence technology, we have created a virtual philosopher that can automatically respond to user’s input in natural language text. It is hoped that the added interactivity can help to increase the appeal of philosophical subject to the users, and the users can have a better idea of the philosophy after an entertaining experience talking with the virtual philosopher. In this paper, we share our considerations for designing the system, the system architecture, and our preliminary user study on the interaction with the virtual philosopher.
Chapter PDF
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Fellbaum, C.: WordNet: An Electronic Lexical Database. MIT Press, Cambridge (1998)
Fryer, L., Carpenter, R.: Bots as Language Learning Tools. Language Learning & Technology 10(3), 8–14 (2006)
Huang, Z., Thint, M., Qin, Z.: Question classification using head words and their hypernyms. In: Proceedings of the Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, Morristown, NJ, USA, pp. 927–936. Association for Computational Linguistics (October 2008)
Kindersley, D.: The Philosophy Book. Dorling Kindersley Ltd. (2011)
Klein, D., Manning, C.D.: Accurate unlexicalized parsing. In: Proceedings of the 41st Annual Meeting on Association for Computational Linguistics - ACL 2003, pp. 423–430 (2003)
Kopp, S., Gesellensetter, L.: A Conversational Agent as Museum Guide – Design and Evaluation of a Real-World Application. In: Panayiotopoulos, T., Gratch, J., Aylett, R.S., Ballin, D., Olivier, P., Rist, T. (eds.) IVA 2005. LNCS (LNAI), vol. 3661, pp. 329–343. Springer, Heidelberg (2005)
Mauldin, M.L.: Chatterbots, Tinymuds, and the Turing Test Entering the Loebner Prize Competition. In: Machine Translation, pp. 16–21 (1994)
Nakatsu, R., Rauterberg, M.: A New Framework for Entertainment Computing: From Passive to Active Experience. In: Kishino, F., Kitamura, Y., Kato, H., Nagata, N. (eds.) ICEC 2005. LNCS, vol. 3711, pp. 1–12. Springer, Heidelberg (2005)
Pedersen, T.: WordNet::Similarity - Measuring the Relatedness of Concepts. In: Proceedings of the Nineteenth National Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI 2004), San Jose, CA. Number Patwardhan 2003, pp. 1024–1025 (2004)
Pedersen, T., Kolhatkar, V.: WordNet::SenseRelate::AllWords: a broad coverage word sense tagger that maximizes semantic relatedness. In: Proceedings of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics - Human Language Technologies 2009 Conference, Boulder, CO., pp. 17–20. Association for Computational Linguistics (2009)
Shawar, B.A., Atwell, E.: Accessing an Information System by Chatting. In: Meziane, F., Métais, E. (eds.) NLDB 2004. LNCS, vol. 3136, pp. 407–412. Springer, Heidelberg (2004)
Tapscott, D.: Growing up digital: The rise of the Net Generation. McGraw-Hill (June 1998)
Theodore de Bary, W.: Confucian Education in Premodern East Asia. In: Tu, W.-M. (ed.) Confucian Traditions in East Asian Modernity, pp. 21–38. Harvard University Press, Massachusetts (1996)
Wallace, R.: The elements of AIML style. Alice AI Foundation (2003)
Weizenbaum, J.: ELIZA-a computer program for the study of natural language communication between man and machine. Communications of the ACM 9(1), 36–45 (1966)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2012 IFIP International Federation for Information Processing
About this paper
Cite this paper
Wang, X., Khoo, E.T., Siriwardana, S., Iroshan, H., Nakatsu, R. (2012). Philosophy Meets Entertainment: Designing an Interactive Virtual Philosopher. In: Herrlich, M., Malaka, R., Masuch, M. (eds) Entertainment Computing - ICEC 2012. ICEC 2012. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 7522. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-33542-6_9
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-33542-6_9
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-642-33541-9
Online ISBN: 978-3-642-33542-6
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)