Prototyping virtual instructors from human-human corpora

International audienceVirtual instructors can be used in several applications, ranging from trainers in simulated worlds to non player characters for virtual games. In this paper we present a novel algorithm for rapidly prototyping virtual instructors from human-human corpora without manual annotation. Automatically prototyping full-fledged dialogue systems from corpora is far from being a reality nowadays. Our algorithm is restricted in that only the virtual instructor can perform speech acts while the user responses are limited to physical actions in the virtual world. We evaluate a virtual instructor, generated using this algorithm, with human users. We compare our results both with human instructors and rule-based virtual instructors hand-coded for the same task