Abstract: Human speech signals that are uttered within an environment are transcribed; the environment includes one or more avatars representing one or more software agents; the human speech signals are directed to at least one of the avatars. At least one non-speech behavioral trace is obtained within the environment; the trace is representative of non-speech behavior directed to the at least one of the avatars. The transcribed human speech signals and the at least one non-speech behavioral trace are forwarded to the one or more software agents. A proposed act is obtained from at least one of the agents; responsive thereto, a command is issued to cause the avatar corresponding to the software agent from which the proposed act is obtained to emit synthesized speech and to act visually in accordance with the proposed act.

Abstract: Methods and apparatus for complementary evidence identification in natural language inference. A given question is obtained and a set of N passages is obtained from a database. A probability is determined, for each passage of the set of N passages, of a corresponding passage being a supportive passage for the given question and the set of N passages is ranked based on the determined probabilities. M passages that are ranked 1 to M of the set of N passages are selected. A set of L passages is selected based on a plurality of scores, each score assigned to a set of candidate passages of the set of N passages, each score being based on the determined probabilities, the selected M passages, and a weighted regulation parameter. The set of L passages is provided to a computerized machine learning system to answer the question based on the set of L passages.

Abstract: Human speech signals that are uttered within an environment are transcribed; the environment includes one or more avatars representing one or more software agents; the human speech signals are directed to at least one of the avatars. At least one non-speech behavioral trace is obtained within the environment; the trace is representative of non-speech behavior directed to the at least one of the avatars. The transcribed human speech signals and the at least one non-speech behavioral trace are forwarded to the one or more software agents. A proposed act is obtained from at least one of the agents; responsive thereto, a command is issued to cause the avatar corresponding to the software agent from which the proposed act is obtained to emit synthesized speech and to act visually in accordance with the proposed act.