Generating socially appropriate tutorial dialog

Analysis of student-tutor coaching dialogs suggest that good human tutors attend to and attempt to influence the motivational state of learners. Moreover, they are sensitive to the social face of the learner, and seek to mitigate the potential face threat of their comments. This paper describes a dialog generator for pedagogical agents that takes motivation and face threat factors into account. This enables the agent to interact with learners in a socially appropriate fashion, and foster intrinsic motivation on the part of the learner, which in turn may lead to more positive learner affective states

Challenges in Computational Modeling of Affective Processes

In this special section we report on the workshop Standards in Emotion Modeling held in August 2011, Leiden, The Netherlands. An important goal of this workshop was to identify challenges related to the development and evaluation of computational models of affective processes. These challenges were approached from a psychological and a computational modeling perspective. In this introduction we present a summary of the results of this week-long workshop. In addition to that, we are proud to present an invited contribution that proposes solutions to several of these challenges. © 2010-2012 IEEE

Modeling Embodied Feedback with Virtual Humans

Kopp S, Allwood J, Grammer K, Ahlsen E, Stocksmeier T. Modeling Embodied Feedback with Virtual Humans. In: Wachsmuth I, Knoblich G, eds. Modeling Communication With Robots And Virtual Humans. Second ZiF Research Group International Workshop on Embodied Communication in Humans and Machines, Bielefeld, Germany, April 5-8, 2006, Revised Selected Papers. Lecture Notes in Computer Science. Vol 4930. Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer; 2008: 18-37.In natural communication, both speakers and listeners are active most of the time. While a speaker contributes new information, a listener gives feedback by producing unobtrusive (usually short) vocal or non-vocal bodily expressions to indicate whether he/she is able and willing to communicate, perceive, and understand the information, and what emotions and attitudes are triggered by this information. The simulation of feedback behavior for artificial conversational agents poses big challenges such as the concurrent and integrated perception and production of multi-modal and multi-functional expressions. We present an approach on modeling feedback for and with virtual humans, based on an approach to study ``embodied feedback'' as a special case of a more general theoretical account of embodied communication. A realization of this approach with the virtual human Max is described and results are presented

Objective Metrics for Interactive Narrative

This paper describes, implements and assesses a series of user-log indicators for automatic interactive narrative evaluation. The indicators include length and duration, diversity, renewal, choice range, choice frequency, and choice variety. Based on a laboratory experiment with players, a significant positive correlation has been observed between two indicators and some aspects of the interactive narrative experience measured by validated scales based on questionnaires