While most dialogue systems restrict themselves to the adjustment of the propositional contents, our work concentrates on the generation of stylistic variations in order to improve the user's perception of the interaction. To accomplish this goal, our approach integrates a social theory of politeness with a cognitive theory of emotions. We propose a hierarchical selection process for politeness behaviors in order to enable the refinement of decisions in case additional context information becomes available.
There are several factors that influence communicative behavior, such as gender, personality or culture. As virtual agents interact in a more and more human-like manner, their behavior should be dependent on social factors as well. Culture is a phenomenon that affects one's behavior without one realizing it. Behavior is thus sometimes perceived as inappropriate because there is no awareness of the cultural gap. Thus, we think cultural background should also influence the communication behavior of virtual agents. Behavioral differences are sometimes easy to recognize by humans but still hard to describe formally, to enable integration into a system that automatically generates culture-specific behavior. In our work, we focus on culture-related differences in the domain of casual Small Talk. Our model of culture-related differences in Small Talk behavior is based on findings described in the literature as well as on a video corpus that was recorded in Germany and Japan. In a validation study, we provide initial evidence that our simulation of culture-specific Small Talk with virtual agents is perceived differently by human observers. We thus implemented a system that automatically generates culture-specific Small Talk dialogs for virtual agents.
Abstract. In this paper, we describe an experiment we conducted to determine the user's level of engagement in a multi-party scenario consisting of human and synthetic interlocutors. In particular, we were interested in the question of whether humans accept a synthetic agent as a genuine conversational partner that is worthy of being attended to in the same way as the human interlocutors. We concentrated on gaze behaviors as one of the most important predictors of conversational attention. Surprisingly, humans paid more attention to an agent that talked to them than to a human conversational partner. No such effect was observed in the reciprocal case, namely when humans addressed an agent as opposed to a human interlocutor.
Avatars are increasingly used to express our emotions in our online communications. Such avatars are used based on the assumption that avatar expressions are interpreted universally among all cultures. This paper investigated cross-cultural evaluations of avatar expressions designed by Japanese and Western designers. The goals of the study were: (1) to investigate cultural differences in avatar expression evaluation and apply findings from psychological studies of human facial expression recognition, (2) to identify expressions and design features that cause cultural differences in avatar facial expression interpretation. The results of our study confirmed that (1) there are cultural differences in interpreting avatars' facial expressions, and the psychological theory that suggests physical proximity affects facial expression recognition accuracy is also applicable to avatar facial expressions, (2) positive expressions have wider cultural variance in interpretation than negative ones, (3) use of gestures and gesture marks may sometimes cause counter-effects in recognizing avatar facial expressions.
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