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Background and Motivation:
User modeling has traditionally
focused on what is generally considered "cognitive" and "rational" aspects
of user behavior; typically the user's knowledge and belief state. While
useful, models focusing strictly on these aspects of user state often miss
critical components of user mental state and behavior: affective states
(e.g., basic affect such as like/dislike reactions; emotions such as frustration,
fear, happiness, anger, etc.; moods), and attitudes (e.g. trust, doubt,
etc.). These factors have also been referred to as "extrarational" and
shown to strongly influence both reasoning and communication. Over the
past 5 years much progress has been made in a number of areas relevant
to the assessment and modeling of these factors. This third
workshop addressing affective and attitude user modeling issues follows
the first and second workshops, held in Banff,
BC, 1999 and Sonthofen,
Germany (2001) .
As before, the main goal is to provide an opportunity for a focused
exchange of ideas about this emerging subfield of user modeling. To this
end, this 3rd one day workshop will address a variety of issues related
to assessing user attitudes, affective states, and personality traits.
The overall aim will be to explore core issues regarding the assessment,
modeling, and adaptation to these states, across a range of applications
(e.g., decision support systems, training and tutoring, telehealth and
VR applications). These issues will include the following:
Why is it important
to assess these factors? What can be gained by augmenting current user
models to include these factors?
When should these
factors be assessed (and adapted to), and when is it safe to ignore them?
Are there situations when this type of assessment and adaptation might
interfere with the human-machine interaction and the task at hand?
What are the best
methods available to accomplish this assessment, modeling, and adaptation?
Can existing user modeling methods be adapted to include these factors,
or must new methods and techniques be developed?
By addressing these issues
in a mixed-mode, informal set of interactions, we hope to explore the feasibility
and utility of attitude, affect, and personality user modeling, identify
key problems to address, and contribute to advancing the state of the art
of this emerging area of research. |