Language-Driven Nonverbal Communication in a Bilingual Conversational Agent

This paper describes an animated conversational agent called Kare1 which integrates a talking head interface with a linguistically motivated human-machine dialogue system. The agent has a range of nonverbal behaviors, which involve a mixture of machine vision, computer animation and natural language processing techniques. The system’s architecture couples the agent’s nonverbal communicative processes very tightly to its model of verbal interaction. We discuss several consequences of this architecture, in particular the ability to use different non-verbal dialogue management signals when speaking different languages. 1 Dialogue Management for Animated Conversational Agents Over the last few years, computational linguists have become interested in using animated conversational agents as an interface medium with the user. Some of this interest centers around lip synchronization in speech synthesis [17, 6, 13]. Other researchers have developed agents which use nonverbal methods to rea...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2003
• Where: CA
• Authors: Scott A. King, Alistair Knott, Brendan McCane
• Keywords: Animated Conversational Agent, CA 2003, Computer Animation, Dialogue Management, Nonverbal