Publication
Fully generated scripted dialogue for embodied agents
Kees Van Deemter; Brigitte Krenn; Paul Piwek; Martin Klesen; Marc Schröder; Stephan Baumann
In: Artificial Intelligence (AIJ), Vol. 172, No. 10, Pages 1219-1244, Elsevier, 2008.
Abstract
This paper presents the NECA approach to the generation of dialogues between Embodied Conversational Agents (ECAs). This approach consist of the automated construction of an abstract script for an entire dialogue (cast in terms of dialogue acts), which is incrementally enhanced by a series of modules and finally textquotedblleftperformedtextquotedblright by means of text, speech and body language, by a cast of ECAs. The approach makes it possible to automatically produce a large variety of highly expressive dialogues, some of whose essential properties are under the control of a user. The paper discusses the advantages and disadvantages of NECA's approach to Fully Generated Scripted Dialogue (FGSD), and explains the main techniques used in the two demonstrators that were built. The paper can be read as a survey of issues and techniques in the construction of ECAs, focusing on the generation of behaviour (i.e., focusing on information presentation) rather than on interpretation. Keywords: Embodied conversational agents; Fully generated scripted dialogue; Multimodal interfaces; Emotion modelling; Affective reasoning; Natural language generation; Speech synthesis; Body language