Incremental speech understanding in a multi-party virtual human dialogue system

This demonstration highlights some emerging capabilities for incremental speech understanding and processing in virtual human dialogue systems. This work is part of an ongoing effort that aims to enable realistic spoken dialogue with virtual humans in multi-party negotiation scenarios (Plüss et al., 2011; Traum et al., 2008b). These scenarios are designed to allow trainees to practice their negotiation skills by engaging in face-to-face spoken negotiation with one or more virtual humans. An important component in achieving naturalistic behavior in these negotiation scenarios, which ideally should have the virtual humans demonstrating fluid turn-taking, complex reasoning, and responding to factors like trust and emotions, is for the virtua