Non-Verbal Cues for Discourse Structure

This paper addresses the issue of designing embodied conversational agents that exhibit appropriate posture shifts during dialogues with human users. Previous research has noted the importance of hand gestures, eye gaze and head nods in conversations between embodied agents and humans. We present an analysis of human monologues and dialogues that suggests that postural shifts can be predicted as a function of discourse state in monologues, and discourse and conversation state in dialogues. On the basis of these findings, we have implemented an embodied conversational agent that uses Collagen in such a way as to generate posture shifts. Proceedings of the Association for Computational Linguistics, July 2001, Toulouse, France This work may not be copied or reproduced in whole or in part for any commercial purpose. Permission to copy in whole or in part without payment of fee is granted for nonprofit educational and research purposes provided that all such whole or partial copies include...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2001
• Where: ACL
• Authors: Justine Cassell, Yukiko I. Nakano, Timothy W. Bickmore, Candace L. Sidner, Charles Rich
• Keywords: ACL 2001, ACL 2007, Electric Research Laboratories, Embodied Conversational Agent, Mitsubishi Electric Research