Practical language processing for virtual humans

NPCEditor is a system for building a natural language processing component for virtual humans capable of en-gaging a user in spoken dialog on a limited domain. It uses a statistical language classification technology for mapping from user’s text input to system responses. NPCEditor provides a user-friendly editor for creating effective virtual humans quickly. It has been deployed as a part of various virtual human systems in several ap-plications. 1. Virtual Humans Imagine talking to a computer system that looks and acts almost human—it converses, it understands, it can reason, and exhibit emotion. As an example, recall some of such computer characters created by Hollywood moviemakers