Skip to main content

Modeling Embodied Feedback with Virtual Humans

  • Conference paper
Book cover Modeling Communication with Robots and Virtual Humans

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNAI,volume 4930))

Abstract

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.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this chapter

Chapter
USD 29.95
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
eBook
USD 39.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
Softcover Book
USD 54.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Compact, lightweight edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Purchases are for personal use only

Institutional subscriptions

Preview

Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.

Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.

References

  1. Allwood, J.: Linguistic Communication as Action and Cooperation. Gothenburg Monographs in Linguistics 2. Göteborg University, Department of Linguistics (1976)

    Google Scholar 

  2. Allwood, J., Nivre, J., Ahlsén, E.: On the semantics and pragmatics of linguistic feedback. Journal of Semantics 9(1), 1–26 (1992)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  3. Allwood, J., Kopp, S., Grammer, K., Ahlsen, E., Oberzaucher, E., Koppensteiner, M.: The analysis of embodied communicative feedback in multimodal corpora – a prerequisite for behaviour simulation. Journal of Language Resources and Evaluation (to appear)

    Google Scholar 

  4. Wachsmuth, I., Becker, C., Kopp, S.: Simulating the Emotion Dynamics of a Multimodal Conversational Agent. In: André, E., Dybkjær, L., Minker, W., Heisterkamp, P. (eds.) ADS 2004. LNCS (LNAI), vol. 3068, pp. 154–165. Springer, Heidelberg (2004)

    Google Scholar 

  5. Beun, R.J., van Eijk, R.M.: Conceptual Discrepancies and Feedback in Human-Computer Interaction. In: Proc. Dutch directions in HCI, ACM Press, New York (2004)

    Google Scholar 

  6. Cassell, J., Thórisson, K.R.: The Power of a Nod and a Glance: Envelope vs. Emotional Feedback in Animated Conversational Agents. Int J. Applied Artificial Intelligence 13(4–5), 519–538 (1999)

    Google Scholar 

  7. Cassell, J., Bickmore, T., Billinghurst, M., Campbell, L., Chang, K., Vilhjálmsson, H., Yan, H.: Embodiment in Conversational Interfaces: Rea. In: Proc. CHI, pp. 520–527 (1999)

    Google Scholar 

  8. Cathcart, N., Carletta, J., Klein, E.: A shallow model of backchannel continuers in spoken dialogue. In: Proc. European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (EACL10), pp. 51–58 (2003)

    Google Scholar 

  9. Ehlich, K.: Interjektionen, Max Niemeyer Verlag (1986)

    Google Scholar 

  10. Fujie, S., Fukushima, K., Kobayashi, T.: A Conversation Robot with Back-channel Feedback Function based on Linguistic and Nonlinguistic Information. In: Proc. ICARA Int. Conference on Autonomous Robots and Agents, pp. 379–384 (2004)

    Google Scholar 

  11. Marsella, S.C., Morency, L.-P., Gratch, J., Okhmatovskaia, A., Lamothe, F., Morales, M., van der Werf, R.J.: Virtual Rapport. In: Gratch, J., Young, M., Aylett, R.S., Ballin, D., Olivier, P. (eds.) IVA 2006. LNCS (LNAI), vol. 4133, pp. 14–27. Springer, Heidelberg (2006)

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  12. Nijholt, A., Heylen, D., Vissers, M., op den Akker, R.: Affective Feedback in a Tutoring System for Procedural Tasks. In: André, E., Dybkjær, L., Minker, W., Heisterkamp, P. (eds.) ADS 2004. LNCS (LNAI), vol. 3068, pp. 244–253. Springer, Heidelberg (2004)

    Google Scholar 

  13. Houck, N., Gass, S.M.: Cross-cultural back channels in English refusals: A source of trouble. In: Jaworski, A. (ed.) Silence-Interdisciplinary perspectives, pp. 285–308. Mouton de Gruyter, Berlin (1997)

    Google Scholar 

  14. Kopp, S., Wachsmuth, I.: Synthesizing multimodal utterances for conversational agents. Computer Animation & Virtual Worlds 15(1), 39–52 (2004)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  15. Kopp, S., Gesellensetter, L., Krämer, N., Wachsmuth, I.: A conversational agent as museum guide – design and evaluation of a real-world application. In: Panayiotopoulos, T., Gratch, J., Aylett, R.S., Ballin, D., Olivier, P., Rist, T. (eds.) IVA 2005. LNCS (LNAI), vol. 3661, pp. 329–343. Springer, Heidelberg (2005)

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  16. Nakano, Y., Reinstein, G., Stocky, T., Cassell, J.: Towards a Model of Face-to-Face Grounding. In: Dignum, F.P.M. (ed.) ACL 2003. LNCS (LNAI), vol. 2922, pp. 553–561. Springer, Heidelberg (2004)

    Google Scholar 

  17. Poggi, I., Pelachaud, C., de Rosis, F., Carofiglio, V., De Carolis, B.: GRETA. A Believable Embodied Conversational Agent. In: Stock, O., Zancarano, M. (eds.) Multimodal Intelligent Information Presentation, Kluwer, Dordrecht (2005)

    Google Scholar 

  18. Scherer, K.R.: Affect Bursts. In: van Goozen, S., van de Poll, N.E., Sergeant, J.A. (eds.) Emotions: Essays on Emotion Theory, pp. 161–193. Lawrence Erlbaum, Mahwah (1994)

    Google Scholar 

  19. Schmid, H.: Improvements in Part-of-Speech Tagging With an Application To German (1995), http://www.ims.uni-stuttgart.de/ftp/pub/corpora/tree-tagger1.pdf

  20. Shimojima, H., Koiso, M., Swerts, Katagiri, Y.: Mouton de GruyterAn Informational Analysis of Echoic Responses in Dialogue. In: Proc. ESSLLI Workshop on Integrating Information from Different Channels in Multi-Media-Contexts, pp. 48–55 (2000)

    Google Scholar 

  21. Stocksmeier, T., Kopp, S., Gibbon, D.: Synthesis of prosodic attitudinal variants in German backchannel “ja”. In: Proc. of Interspeech 2007, Antwerp, Belgium (2007)

    Google Scholar 

  22. Takeuchi, M., Kitaoka, N., Nakagawa, S.: Timing detection for realtime dialog systems using prosodic and linguistic information. In: Proc. of the International Conference Speech Prosody (SP 2004), pp. 529–532 (2004)

    Google Scholar 

  23. Thórisson, K.R.: Communicative Humanoids: A Computational Model of Psychosocial Dialogue Skills. Ph.D. thesis, MIT (1996)

    Google Scholar 

  24. Vilhjálmsson, H.H., Cassell, J.: BodyChat: Autonomous Commumicative Behaviors in Avators. Agents, 269–276 (1998)

    Google Scholar 

  25. Wachsmuth, I., Knoblich, G.: Embodied communication in humans and machines - a research agenda. Artificial Intelligence Review 24(3-4), 517–522 (2005)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  26. Wallers, A.: Minor sounds of major importance - prosodic manipulation of synthetic backchannels in swedish. Master’s thesis, KTH Stockholm, Sweden (2006)

    Google Scholar 

  27. Ward, N.: Using prosodic cues to decide when to produce back-channel utterances. In: Proceedings of ICSLP, pp. 1728–1731 (1996)

    Google Scholar 

  28. Ward, N.: Prosodic features which cue backchannel responses in English and Japanese. Pragmatics 32, 1177–1207 (2000)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  29. Ward, N., Tsukahara, W.: Prosodic features which cue back-channel responses in English and Japanese. Journal of Pragmatics 32, 1177–1207 (2000)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  30. Wiener, N.: Cybernetics and Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine. MIT Press, Cambridge (1948)

    Google Scholar 

  31. Yngve, V.H.: On getting a word in edgewise. In: Papers from the 6th Regional Meeting of the Chicago Linguistics Society, University of Chicago, pp. 567–578 (1970)

    Google Scholar 

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

Authors

Editor information

Ipke Wachsmuth Günther Knoblich

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

Copyright information

© 2008 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

About this paper

Cite this paper

Kopp, S., Allwood, J., Grammer, K., Ahlsen, E., Stocksmeier, T. (2008). Modeling Embodied Feedback with Virtual Humans. In: Wachsmuth, I., Knoblich, G. (eds) Modeling Communication with Robots and Virtual Humans. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 4930. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-79037-2_2

Download citation

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-79037-2_2

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-540-79036-5

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-540-79037-2

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

Publish with us

Policies and ethics