Utterance Behavior of Users While Playing Basketball with a Virtual Teammate

Research on human-agent interaction has focused mainly on domains which are conversational in nature, but little work has been done on examining the behavior of interactive agents in domains such as team sports. This paper analyzes utterance behavior in this domain, specifically a virtual basketball game with an agent teammate. The main motivation is to assess the nature of utterances during the course of a game. We use a Wizard-of-Oz system which allows a hidden operator to appropriately respond to user utterances. Utterances are analyzed by annotating and categorizing according to Searle’s illocutionary speech acts. We find that there is evidence to support the process of the user beginning with basic utterances needed to play the game, confirming that the agent can understand them, and then moving to more complex utterances. We also find that non-task utterances are used and their proportion increases as the game progresses.