Advanced Content and Interface Personalization through Conversational Behavior and Affective Embodied Conversational Agents

Conversation is becoming one of the key interaction modes in HMI. As a result, the conversational agents (CAs) have become an important tool in various everyday scenarios. From Apple and Microsoft to Amazon, Google, and Facebook, all have adapted their own variations of CAs. The CAs range from chatbots and 2D, carton-like implementations of talking heads to fully articulated embodied conversational agents performing interaction in various concepts. Recent studies in the field of face-to-face conversation show that the most natural way to implement interaction is through synchronized verbal and co-verbal signals (gestures and expressions). Namely, co-verbal behavior represents a major source of discourse cohesion. It regulates communicative relationships and may support or even replace verbal counterparts. It effectively retains semantics of the information and gives a certain degree of clarity in the discourse. In this chapter, we will represent a model of generation and realization of more natural machine-generated output

Referential Communication Between Friends and Strangers in the Wild

The Map Task (Anderson et al., 1991) and Tangram Task (Clark & Wilkes-Gibbs, 1986) are traditional referential communication tasks that are used in psycholinguistics research to demonstrate how conversational partners mutually agree on descriptions (or referring expressions) for landmarks or unusual target objects. These highly-controlled, laboratory-based tasks take place under conditions that are relatively unusual for naturally-occurring conversations (Speed, Wnuk, & Majid, 2016). In this study, we used the Artwalk Task (Liu, Fox Tree, & Walker, 2016) – a real world-situated blend of the Map Task and Tangram Task – to demonstrate that the process of negotiating referring expressions ‘in the wild’ is similar to the process that takes place in a laboratory. In Artwalk, participant pairs communicated via a Skype-to-mobile phone connection. One participant guided the other through a small downtown area with the goal of identifying public art objects, finding objects twice during two rounds. In addition to replicating laboratory results, we also found that acquaintanceship and extraversion influenced the number of unique descriptors used by dyads in this task. In Round 1, introverts in stranger dyads used fewer descriptors but introverts in friend dyads were indistinguishable from extraverts. The influence of extraversion declined by Round 2. This study suggests that referent negotiation observed in labs is generalizable but that naturalistic communication is subject to social and personality factors that may not be as influential in laboratory conditions