141,617 research outputs found
Teaching Virtual Characters to use Body Language
Non-verbal communication, or ābody languageā, is a critical component in constructing believable virtual characters. Most often, body language is implemented by a set of ad-hoc rules.We propose a new method for authors to specify and refine their characterās body-language responses. Using our method, the author watches the character acting in a situation, and provides simple feedback on-line. The character then learns to use its body language to maximize the rewards, based on a reinforcement learning algorithm
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Reference and Gestures in Dialogue Generation: Three Studies with Embodied Conversational Agents
This paper reports on three studies into social presence cues which were carried out in the context of the NECA (Net-environment for Embodied Emotional Conversational Agents) project and the EPOCH network. The first study concerns the generation of referring expressions. We adopted an existing algorithm for generating referring expressions such that it could run according to an egocentric and a neutral strategy. In an evaluation study, we found that the two strategies were correlated with the perceived friendliness of the speaker. In the second and the third study, we evaluated the gestures that were generated by the NECA system. In this paper, we briefly summarize the most salient results of these two studies. They concern the effect of gestures on perceived quality of speech and information retention
Learning to Speak and Act in a Fantasy Text Adventure Game
We introduce a large scale crowdsourced text adventure game as a research
platform for studying grounded dialogue. In it, agents can perceive, emote, and
act whilst conducting dialogue with other agents. Models and humans can both
act as characters within the game. We describe the results of training
state-of-the-art generative and retrieval models in this setting. We show that
in addition to using past dialogue, these models are able to effectively use
the state of the underlying world to condition their predictions. In
particular, we show that grounding on the details of the local environment,
including location descriptions, and the objects (and their affordances) and
characters (and their previous actions) present within it allows better
predictions of agent behavior and dialogue. We analyze the ingredients
necessary for successful grounding in this setting, and how each of these
factors relate to agents that can talk and act successfully
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