Varying Personality in Spoken Dialogue with a Virtual Human

We extend a virtual human architecture that has been used to build tactical questioning characters with a parameterizable personality model, allowing characters to be designed with different personalities, allowing a richer set of possible user interactions in a training environment. Two experiments were carried out to evaluate the framework. In the first, it was determined that personality models do have an impact on user perception of several aspects of the personality of the character. In the second, a model of assertiveness was evaluated and found to have a small but significant impact on the users who interacted with the full virtual human, and larger differences in judgement of annotators who examined only the verbal transcripts of the interaction.

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2009
• Where: IVA
• Authors: Michael Rushforth, Sudeep Gandhe, Ron Artstein, Antonio Roque, Sarrah Ali, Nicolle Whitman, David R. Traum
• Keywords: Artificial Intelligence, IVA 2009, Personality Models, Tactical Questioning Characters, Virtual Human