The power of a nod and a glance: Envelope vs. emotional feedback in animated conversational agents

Cassell, Justine; Þórisson, Kristinn R.

doi:10.1080/088395199117360

Cited by 282 publications

(153 citation statements)

References 13 publications

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“…This modality can help to resolve the problem to which of the visible agents a user directs a question. The role of gaze in dialogue and conversation has been studied by Cassell et al [3]. In Nijholt and Hulstijn [8] it is discussed how we can incorporate such results in annotated templates that are used for generation of system utterances in a dialogue system.…”

Section: Gaze Behavior Among Multiple Conversational Agentsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Dialogues for Embodied Agents in Virtual Environments

Akker

Nijholt

2000

Lecture Notes in Computer Science

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Abstract. This paper is a progress report on our research, design, and implementation of a virtual reality environment where users (visitors, customers) can interact with agents that help them to obtain information, to perform certain transactions and to collaborate with them in order to get some tasks done. We consider this environment as a laboratory for doing research and experiments with users interacting with agents in multimodal ways, referring to visualized information and making use of knowledge possessed by domain agents, but also, in the future, by agents that represent other visitors of this environment. As such, we think that our environment can be seen as a laboratory for research on users and user interaction in (electronic) commerce, educational and entertainment environments.

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Section: Gaze Behavior Among Multiple Conversational Agentsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Dialogues for Embodied Agents in Virtual Environments

Akker

Nijholt

2000

Lecture Notes in Computer Science

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“…If the aim is to build a full agent able to respond to emotions, including dialog-related attitudes and feelings makes the implementation harder. This is not just an algorithmic or hardware problem but also one of design: perhaps requiring multiple simultaneous threads of control (something not supported by today's standard architectures for dialog management) in order to allow reactive (shallow, emotion-based, conventional) responses to execute swiftly and somewhat autonomously from more deliberative, content-based response planning (Cassell and Thorisson, 1999).…”

Section: Prospects and Open Questionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Schmandt (Schmandt, 1994) built a system which gave driving directions and used the length and pitch slope of user utterances to control the pace of its delivery. Thorisson and Cassell's (1999) Ymir was a multi-modal animated system which detected the onset and offset of the user's voice, among other things, and used this to determine when to be listening/not-listening and taking-a-turn/yielding-the-turn; the version of the system which did this was ranked higher and considered more "helpful" by users. Ward and Tsukahara (1999) built a system which detected a prosodic feature cuing back-channel feedback (uh-huh etc.)…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

A study in responsiveness in spoken dialog

Ward

Tsukahara

2003

International Journal of Human-Computer Studies

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Abstract:The future of human-computer interfaces may include systems which are humanlike in abilities and behavior. One particularly interesting aspect of human-to-human communication is the ability of some conversation partners to sensitively pick up on the nuances of the other's utterances, as they shift from moment to moment, and to use this information to subtly adjust responses to express interest, supportiveness, sympathy, and the like. This paper reports a model of this ability in the context of a spoken dialog system for a tutoring-like interaction. The system used information about the user's internal state -such as feelings of confidence, confusion, pleasure, and dependency -as inferred from the prosody of his utterances and the context, and used this information to select the most appropriate acknowledgement form at each moment. Although straightforward rating reveals no significant preference for a system with this ability, a clear preference was found when users rated the system after listening to a recording of their interaction with it. This suggests that human-like, real-time sensitivity can be of value in interfaces. The paper further discusses ways to discover and quantify such rules of social interaction, using corpus-based-analysis, developer intuitions, and feedback from naive judges; and further suggests that the technique of 'evaluation after re-listening' is useful for evaluating spoken dialog systems which operate at near-human levels of performance.

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“…This feedback helps to obtain a more smooth conversation and exchange of information. Cassell et al [2] have compared different kinds of nonverbal feedback in some experiments. They distinguished:…”

Section: Importance Of Nonverbal Behaviormentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In summary: often a speaker looks away from a hearer when she starts an utterance and she looks towards he hearer when ending an utterance. 2 Cassell et al [1,3] have investigated the relation between propositional content of utterances and gaze behavior. This is interesting from the point of view that we can make further steps towards generating the behavior of agents (syntactic, semantic and pragmatic content of utterances, intonation, face expressions, gaze behavior, head and body movements) from a representation of (the history of) previous interactions, the representation of believes, desires and intentions and the representation of some personality characteristics.…”

Section: Embodied Agents and Gaze Behaviormentioning

confidence: 99%