Social role awareness in animated agents

Abstract

This paper promotes social role awareness as a desirable capability of animated agents, that are by now strong affective reasoners, but otherwise often lack the social competence observed with humans. In particular, humans may easily adjust their behavior depending on their respective role in a socio-organizational setting, whereas their synthetic pendants tend to be driven mostly by attitudes, emotions, and personality. Our main contribution is the incorporation of 'social filter programs' to mental models of animated agents. Those programs may qualify an agent's expression of its emotional state by the social context, thereby enhancing the agent's believability as a conversational partner or virtual teammate. Our implemented system is entirely webbased and demonstrates socially aware animated agents in an environment similar to Hayes-Roth's Cybercafé. Keywordsbelievability, social agents, human-like qualities of synthetic agents, social dimension in communication, affective reasoning and emotion expression

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